The Audemars Piguet and Swatch Collab That Broke the Internet

In the end, it wasn’t so much a wristwatch as it was … a key chain?

Earlier this week, watch fans turned feral over the announcement that Audemars Piguet was collaborating with Swatch, the mass-market retailer whose timepieces are kitschy, colorful and modest in cost.

The assumption (hope?) was that this collaboration would result in a plastic version of the Royal Oak, the watch that Audemars Piguet is really known for. Many Royal Oak models have a retail price somewhere in the mid-five figures, whereas a Swatch, at the highest end sells for about $500. The Royal Oak owns a particular space in pop culture. Bad Bunny wore one when he performed at the Super Bowl. Future has rapped about it. Certain Royal Oaks sell for six figures on the resale market. It’s a known flex. By Monday afternoon, people were already camping outside Swatch stores for the Saturday release. (There is precedent for such blowout high-low collabs from Swatch. Four years ago, the big story of the world watch was its MoonSwatch, made in partnership with Omega.)

Swatch didn’t initially reveal the design. So people did what they do now when there’s an absence of information: They turned to A.I.

For 24 hours, friends and colleagues bombarded me with Instagram videos of deepfaked rubbery Royal Oaks in Trix-box colors. I fell for a particularly convincing example of a man wearing a cherry red Royal Oak until a better informed friend dispelled that.

“It’s going to be a big lanyard watch,” he said.

He was right. The Royal Pop, as it is called, is a timepiece strung on a lanyard, similar to what you might hang a work ID card on. Swatch calls it a pocket watch, though it looks more like a necklace to me.

There are eight versions selling for $400 and $420 depending on the configuration of the face. The colors are cartoonish, including lemonade yellow, goblin green and bubble gum pink.

“Where’s the band?” many asked. Commenters likened the watches to something you’d dig out of a Happy Meal. Flavor Flav was invoked. People whined on Swatch’s Instagram that they were packing up and getting out of line.

But you know what? People will still buy this product. We have seen these kind of stunts time and time again in the sneaker market. A shoe is teased, people mock it and point out how no one will want it. And it will still sell out and wind up on the resale market for three times the price.

This is another example of how kitschy novelty products have become a necessity for luxury companies as they tussle for brand awareness and greater market share. It’s perhaps best to think of the Royal Pop as something like a bag charm that you loop onto a purse or tote — AP’s version of Hermès’s $820 leather horse charm or Prada’s $650 sailboat pendant.

These items are a way to attract an entry customer who ranks Instagram-baity quirkiness over quality. It no doubt pleased the decision makers at AP and Swatch that many of the people chattering about the Royal Pop this week were TikTok native. My editor’s teenage son suggested that if we wanted Gen Z men to read us, we better write about “the AP collab.” Well, here you go.

Dior takes LACMA

The reinvented Los Angeles County of Art Museum, a concrete colosseum on Wilshire Boulevard, has been open for only a few weeks. And yet, on Wednesday night, it hosted its first fashion show. If any brand was going to get there first, it was going to be Dior, the starting QB of team LVMH. The after-dusk affair was stuffed with Los Angeles hallmarks and clichés: ’60s-era convertibles, shadowy lighting, as if Philip Marlowe was going to crawl out of any corner, Ed Ruscha and Al Pacino sitting side by side.

Thus far at Dior, Jonathan Anderson’s mélange of bouffant, rococo silhouettes and theatrically shrunken coats has, at moments, vexed me. That wasn’t the case for his first cruise show. The shapes were more legible, and this collection felt shrugged on. Extravagance came through more in the fabrications than the forms. There were drop-waist dresses (officially now a trend following their prevalence at Chanel as well), a dress of ribboned loops, with a razory black coat over it and suits consisting of hourglass-waist jackets and slouchy pleated trousers.

For men: pajama shirts with white piping and button-ups printed with abstractions of Ruscha’s work. But it’s the jeans I’ll remember. Tattered at the knees, Forever 21-style, yet threaded with silver. Those danced up to the line of bad taste. Maybe even tripped right over it. For more, read Vanessa Friedman’s review here.

Ask Vanessa

I love white, off-white and cream pants for women (and men for that matter), but unless they are jeans, they are often see-through, with the pockets and seams visible through the fabric. Is there a secret to wearing them so this is less of an issue? Am I looking in the wrong places? — Sharon, Harrisburg, Pa.

In the spring, a woman’s fancy turns lightly to thoughts of … white pants. And not just because of that old saw about wearing white between Memorial Day and Labor Day. (Honestly, no one pays attention to that any more.) When it gets warmer, we naturally gravitate to lighter colors. Read more …

Other things worth knowing about:

Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, tweeted a photo of Marco Rubio wearing a fleecy Nike sweatsuit, like what Nicolas Maduro wore in U.S. custody. The post continues the administration’s troll-your-enemies offensive. (It also shows that Rubio doesn’t care much about brand synergy: He’s wearing Adidas sneakers, not Nikes, in the photo.)
Gucci interpreting Robert Longo’s “Men in the Cities” series in its cruise show teaser. Sublime.
LVMH has agreed to sell Marc Jacobs to WHP, the parent company of labels like Rag & Bone, Bonobos and Express. The news release said Jacobs would continue as creative director, but this sure feels like the end of the Marc Jacobs brand existing as something remotely like a European-style luxury label.
Jonah Hill makes his return in front of the camera in an ad campaign for Kith. Whatever you think of Kith and its middlebrow brand of streetwear, it’s impressive how many celebs they’ve managed to wrangle into its ad campaigns. Hill follows Michael Imperioli, Tramell Tillman, Jason Alexander, the starting lineup for the New York Knicks, Pierce Brosnan, John Leguizamo, Wesley Snipes and Martin Scorsese.
To quote my colleague Sandra Garcia, “I feel like seeing one of the Olsen twins in 2026 is the equivalent of seeing Andre 3000 in 2013.”
We’ve hit the point where “boxers as shorts” is a standard maneuver for the men of Hollywood. Paul Mescal in Gucci two years ago, Justin Bieber at the Grammys, Hudson Williams at the Met Gala afters and now Kelvin Harrison Jr. at Cannes this week. Are we, perhaps, running out of ideas, folks?