Our grandfather kept a Royal Oak poster above his desk in the 16th, yellowed at the corners, the kind of object you stop noticing because it has always been there. One of us got a Swatch free in a cereal box at fifteen and wore it through a whole summer until the strap split at the lug, and in the irrational way you attach yourself to things at that age, it felt like the first thing that was actually ours. Two watches at opposite ends of every spectrum that matters in horology, and we never thought of them as belonging on the same wrist.
Then in May the Royal Pop arrived, and everyone we knew queued outside the Swatch on rue de Rivoli for hours. We didn’t queue. We went back to the apartment in the 11th, pushed the dishes aside, pulled the lamp closer, and started cutting leather. The watch was beautiful. What we couldn’t stop thinking about was the calfskin lanyard it came with, the one you were apparently supposed to wrap twice around your wrist and call it finished.
Felt like buying a Bugatti and being handed a bicycle helmet.
So we made what we wanted to wear instead. Indigo-dyed cord from a small supplier outside Lyon, raw brass hardware filed by hand, alligator and shrunken calf saddle-stitched the way it has been done in French ateliers for two hundred years, burnished with bone until the leather darkened the way only real leather does. The first six were not good. The seventh was the one we wore out of the apartment, the eighth was the one we showed someone else, and somewhere around the twelfth we realized we were no longer making a thing for ourselves, we were making a thing.
Every piece is still built by the two of us, on the same table, under the same lamp. We sign the inside of every cuff with the date and a number, and when a colorway runs out of numbers, that colorway is done. The Royal Pop is not really one watch. Threaded through indigo cord on the forearm, it reads like something out of a Helmut Newton photograph. Docked into alligator at the wrist, it reads like the watch your grandfather would have understood. Clipped to a tote on Sunday morning, it reads like the cereal-box Swatch we grew up with. Same movement, three lives, and the only thing that changes is the leather.
Eight thousand of these watches exist in the world.
If you got one, you already know it deserves more than what came in the box.
