A Personality Accessory That's Not A Hat

Fashion has never been faster, but personal style has stagnated. For every stale Coachella look, every Substack vivisecting shirt tucks, and every image-research account that pulls the same “rare” references that ironically breed homogeneity, we’ve never had greater awareness of the concept but less success in the belabored pursuit of it. Now, there’s nothing ignoble about wanting to discover your own or, like all great artists, taking bits and pieces from what’s around you, but the whole point of true personal style isn’t to study and wholesale copy — it’s to figure it out yourself.

While we can only help cultivate taste and wish you luck in creating the alchemy needed to synthesize the ideas you lift from elsewhere, we can show you the good stuff that’s so individual-seeming it lessens the burden on the other harder elements of personal style. Hats might come to mind as the top personality accessory (we’ve written about them before), but with the proliferation of pillboxes, it’s a hold from us. Belts? Peaked. What about watches? Yes, but when even the Baignoire is starting to feel banal, we have a different proposal: What about a silly little Swatch?

Picture a big-girl Saint Laurent suit with a candy-bracelet Caramellissima. Or a Miu-Miu-ish getup, complete with a structured lady bag and a fox stole... and the freaky-vintage-timepiece equivalent of Guy Fieri. Or, if you’re a certain hitmaker out and about prior to your Coachella appearance, go wild and get papped wearing a Mission to the Pink Moonphase — to match your pink jumper. No one does fun — which is the direct opposite and therefore most appropriate counterpoint to fashion and the general vibe right now — like Swatch, but it also makes something for everyone, whatever their preferences in color, art, sport, music, cinema, or celebrity. This was never clearer to me than when I recently visited the museum at the brand’s Biel headquarters, where I ogled the beaded leather strap of Pedro Almodóvar’s collab, had a giggle at the Bunnysutra (exactly what it sounds like), admired a flower-shaped carrying case designed by a Thai princess, and flipped through board after board of straight wacky fire from the 1980s on.

Caramellissima

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Squarely Berry

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Petal Frenzy

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Serenity Of Sage

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Sweet Strawberry Dream

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In contrast, the watches’ insides are very serious, as I learned on a tour of Swatch’s Boncourt factory, where I observed a team of robots and their human minders hard at work streamlining the craft into an elegant series of industry-disrupting processes that result in the Sistem51 movement. I might’ve gotten my balance springs and Bioceramic mixed up somewhere around Step 4, but the outcome of the technical innovation wasn’t lost on me: performance, longevity, and the ability to print practically anything your heart desires (copulating rabbits) on a watch face at an astonishingly reasonable price point.

But knowing that, for many of us, NYLON House Art Basel 2024 is about as extreme as it gets, I’m going back to what matters most: looks. And in achieving a truer outward projection of “me,” I maintain that a Swatch, archival or modern, can function as a personal-style cheat code in that its inherent eccentricity and sense of humor can reflect your own. I could then further argue that, in a time when there aren’t a lot of laughs to be had, there’s no better reason to dress like the kooky, unique individual you are.

Swatch, too, is leaning into what makes it special, CEO Alain Villard tells NYLON. “This is an opportunity,” he says. “When everything is a little bit more complicated, we need to make sure the passion and motivation are even higher.” I most fervently aspire to live a life where I don’t need to know what time it is, but until then, a special-edition Christmas 1994 Christian Lacroix Swatch that only tells the hour will do.