A post on Lamborghini watches by an automotive dude from TTAC.
Some links on Lamborghini watches: Tonino Lamborghini and Tonino Lamborghini, Lamborghini Watches USA - It's not a watch, it's a timepiece!
The post is also by extension about some other "new luxury" car-branded watches.
I am using this entry as a way to bookmark the post and re-posting below.
Full disclosure: I’m a huge Lamborghini fan. Enough of a fan that I can get a little worked up
about the brand’s directional wobbles over the past decade. Make no
mistake, though: if my budget would stretch to a Murcielago, I’d have
one. (About the Aventador, I’m a bit diffident.) Ferrari’s
transformation from manufacturer of unreliable but pretty cars to
merchandising machine and tyrannical allocation scheme has made
Lamborghini seem much cooler by comparison. The clinical precision of
the Gallardo makes the Dino-successor Ferraris look a bit try-hard and
the big twelve-cylinder supercars have the swagger that the FF, 612, and
F12berlinetta seem to be deliberately avoiding.
But there are times that one simply wants to turn one’s head away
from the catastrophe that is Lambo’s Ferrari-aping merch scheme, and
this is one of them.
Let’s get this on the table first: If you wear a Swiss “luxury watch”, you’re a douchebag. (Full disclosure: I have a few of them myself.) The bigger the watch is, and the more elaborate/flashy it is, the worse you are. The newer and more quick-bake the brand is, the more horrifying your personal presence is to people who weren’t raised in a trailer prior to the IPO/Goldman bonus/first-round draft pick/real-estate deal/personal-injury settlement. I’ve complained about this before, but wearing a watch that is unnecessarily complex and impossible to fix amounts to a Nero-esque destruction of capital without the attendant flair. This goes double if your watchmaker’s brand was “dormant” for fifty years or more before being pried out of the hands of someone’s step-great-grandchild by a venture-capital firm, triple if Nicholas Hayek imagined your brand while he was having a “speedball” medically administered by a twenty-two-year-old Italian nurse who does figure modeling in the evenings.
Let’s get this on the table first: If you wear a Swiss “luxury watch”, you’re a douchebag. (Full disclosure: I have a few of them myself.) The bigger the watch is, and the more elaborate/flashy it is, the worse you are. The newer and more quick-bake the brand is, the more horrifying your personal presence is to people who weren’t raised in a trailer prior to the IPO/Goldman bonus/first-round draft pick/real-estate deal/personal-injury settlement. I’ve complained about this before, but wearing a watch that is unnecessarily complex and impossible to fix amounts to a Nero-esque destruction of capital without the attendant flair. This goes double if your watchmaker’s brand was “dormant” for fifty years or more before being pried out of the hands of someone’s step-great-grandchild by a venture-capital firm, triple if Nicholas Hayek imagined your brand while he was having a “speedball” medically administered by a twenty-two-year-old Italian nurse who does figure modeling in the evenings.
With that said, the Venn diagram of the buyers for expensive
supercars and ridiculous watches is pretty much a circle, so it stands
to reason that for every exotic car, there will be a somewhat less
exotic watch. It has to be less exotic than the car because there’s also
a merch possibility for the proles who can’t get the car just yet, and
also because the very best watchmakers have too much pride to let
something like that happen.
Ferrari started their time in the watch game with the staid but
impeccably respectable Girard-Perregaux before bowing to their
customer’s true demographic and moving the brand to quick-bake reboot
and Sly Stallone favorite, Panerai. In 2010 those two brands parted ways
and Ferrari started a house-brand watch lineup featuring “Swiss movements” with what the hardcore watch fanatics say is a heavy dose of Chinese componentry and assembly.
That takes care of the proles and the F1 team fans, leaving the
company free to make a second deal with Hublot in which the Ferrari name
is applied to some of the world’s most loathsome timekeeping instruments.
It’s a neat trick, really. There’s a $599 watch for the guy who will
never own a Ferrari, and the $22,000 watch for the guy who has two of
them and is in the queue for his next one.
As is usually the case, Lamborghini isn’t that deft. Their choice was
to partner with mid-level generic-luxury brand Tonino to create a line
of $1500-3500 watches with the Lamborghini brand applied. Unlike the
high-end Ferrari watches from G-P, Hublot, and Panerai, the Tonino Lambo
watches come in every possible size and style, thus removing any chance
that someone might recognize the watch without putting their face ten
inches from the dial. As far as I can tell, the watches are existing
Toninos with a bull at the twelve-o-clock mark.
The resulting products are neither compelling nor particularly cheap,
thus ensuring that they won’t be bought by Lamborghini owners or
Lamborghini fans. Being among the latter is tough anyway; if you get
caught prancing around in a full Rosso Corsa outfit by your friends, you
can always say you’re a fan of the race team, but if you’re wearing
Lamborghini clothing and you don’t have a Lamborghini, you’d be better
off staying in the house.
No surprise, then, that the discount website Touch Of Modern is
half-pricing Lambo watches this week. No need to rush; they have plenty
of them. I can only imagine one possible reason to purchase one, and
that would be an attempt to humiliate yourself into accelerating the
purchase of that nicely patinated ’04 with the crappy e-gear and the Audi 100 climate controls. If that’s why, then by all means, get the yellow watch, too!
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