HOROLOVOX

Part 9: My prized collection of vintage Pierre Cardin Espace watches from 1971–72. I first discovered them in Pieter Doensen’s long out-of-print book, “Watch: History of the Modern Wristwatch” —written in Utrecht and still my personal watch bible. Seeing those pages changed the way I looked at watches. Here was an entire PC collection that abandoned nearly every convention: metal blocks, Lucite forms, smoky crystals, layered discs, sculptural curves and radically asymmetric cases. The series included 26 designs and variations created for Jaeger in Paris, combining serious mechanical watchmaking with the full force of Cardin’s Space Age vision.

These were not ordinary fashion watches with a designer’s name added to the dial. They were complete design objects—strange, wearable pieces of brutalist architecture that still look as though they arrived from an alternate future. Discovering them became enormously important to me as a collector and later as a designer. They helped confirm that a watch could be more than a traditional round case and familiar dial; it could be provocative, humorous, sculptural and completely unexpected. In many ways, this collection and many of the others helped establish the visual language I have continued exploring to this day at @xericwatches