As an owner and the creative director of the British shoe brand Grenson, Tim Little always wears his own designs. But frequently, he said, he notices people bypassing his feet to admire what’s on his wrist: a 39-millimeter stainless-steel TAG Heuer Monaco.
“People look at it in meetings — I can see them looking at my wrist,” Mr. Little, 61, said during a phone interview from his house in Rye, about 70 miles southeast of London, where he and his wife, Julia, also have a home. “People come up to me and ask me about it, or people say, ‘I’ve got a watch like that’ or ‘I used to have one of those’ or ‘I love the Monaco.’”
Mr. Little has owned three of the distinctive square-case timepieces, but not at the same time: The first, a gift from his wife, was stolen, and the second disappeared on a business trip. “Ever since I first wore a Monaco, I’ve never been able to do without it,” he said. “It’s something that’s really important to me.”
He said he became aware of the Monaco about 35 years ago, when the original model — introduced by the Heuer brand in 1969 and produced for less than a decade — was all that was available. (Heuer was acquired by the TAG Group in 1985.)
“I couldn’t have afforded one of the original ones,” said Mr. Little, who was working in advertising at the time. Besides, he added, “there was no real internet back then, so finding one would have been impossible.”
He settled on a rugged TAG Heuer 2000 dive watch, purchased for about 1,000 pounds at Harrods, that he tends not to wear these days.
TAG Heuer released its first Monaco, based on the original design and with a black dial, in 1998. A blue-dial version followed in 2003; it was based on the Monaco that Steve McQueen wore in the 1971 film “Le Mans.”
“When I read an article saying that they were rereleasing the original blue-faced one with the square dial, I just went crazy,” Mr. Little said. “From then on, it was like an obsession.”
The Littles were planning to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary, a bit belatedly, at Cliveden House, a luxury hotel in Berkshire, just west of London. As she thought about a suitable gift for her husband, Ms. Little said in a recent interview, she knew the Monaco was “something he really loved.”
“I suppose that, in my mind, maybe I thought that if he didn’t want to wear it, I’d wear it, because it was just so gorgeous,” she said.
Over a pre-dinner cocktail at the hotel’s bar, she presented the watch to Mr. Little.
“It wasn’t a shock that she knew I liked it,” he said, “but it was a complete shock that she would buy it.”
Three years later, in 2006, he got a different type of surprise: The watch was stolen from a metal desk on the ground floor of the Littles’ home while the couple and their three children were asleep upstairs.
Mr. Little bought a replacement with the insurance money, a purchase that he described as a bit surreal. “It’s really odd buying something of that value for yourself without a huge amount of emotion,” he said, “because all the emotion was around the original gift from Julia.”
“I felt a little bit of a traitor to the first watch,” he noted. “It was like a pet dying and then you buy another pet and you feel guilty about the first.”
Then in 2009, as he was packing to fly home from a business trip to New York, he noticed the replacement was missing. “By this point, I feel like a total fraud,” he said. “I feel like I’m jinxing this watch somehow and it must be something to do with me, not the watch.”
With the second insurance check, he bought the Monaco that he wears today, a chronograph, or stopwatch, with a skeleton back.
“It was a relief to buy it and to have a Monaco back on my wrist,” he said.
(He had joined Grenson in 2005, and he and his wife bought the company in 2010. He also operated his own self-named shoe line until 2020.)
Years later, Ms. Little said, they still think about the other timepieces: “It still, to this day, is sad, and the second one too, but clearly Tim was meant to have this watch, so he’s going to keep buying it.”
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