Why Andy Warhol wore a Cartier Tank watch

 

Andy Warhol understood that watches were not only utilitarian mechanical devices whose function it was to tell the time, but also symbols of poetry and desire. For Warhol, a watch’s real purpose was to evoke sex appeal and glamour. The watch with which he is most associated is the Cartier Tank. In a famous polaroid of him taken in the 1970s, he stands in front of what looks like a French rococo painting, with his gaze cast away from the camera while his right arm rests on his shoulder, making his Cartier Tank with its gold cabochon and black alligator strap the focus of the photo. The message is clear: the Tank is the star of this particular picture, not Warhol.

The image is an incredibly artful version of so much of the obsessive watch content and posing we see on Instagram today. In doing so, Warhol helped to kickstart the pop-cultural moment the world of haute horology is experiencing right now. Once, a rather tweedy hobby for old white men, today rappers, fashion designers and sports stars now brag about having banging watch collections. 

Nary a week goes by without a rapper or designer showing off a wild customisation of a ludicrously expensive watch. And to think that during the “quartz crisis” of the 1970s, the advent of digital watches in the 1980s and the mobile phones of today, that Swiss watch executives once feared an existential threat to their industry. Warhol once said of his favourite watch: “I don’t wear a Tank watch to tell the time. Actually I never even wind it. I wear a Tank because it is the watch to wear!” If they’d have only listened to Warhol, they’d have saved themselves a lot of worry.

Full article here