With it’s new ambassador, a cat named Choupette, Hublot is showing all of us how to loosen up and playfully embrace loud luxury.
It’s become a cliche for us somewhat hip coastal elites, we bearded men comfortable enough with our feminine sides to publicly indulge rather little vintage watches 0p-ooooooo…shit.
My 19-year-old cat Beau just pushed his way onto my keyboard demanding I pet him. No kidding.
Let me try again.
Aging hipster watch journalists like me tend to shun Hublot watches, and we do this because these timepieces are unabashedly loud. If we, the heirs of Alan Alda’s stylistic legacy, are going to “do luxury,” it’s going to be quiet luxury. Not Hublot.
Hodinkee’s founder, Ben Clymer, openly shunned Hublot (until they put out a collab watch a few years ago), stating that the brand didn’t resonate with Hodinkee’s readership. Given recent editorial shifts as The Dink, that may no longer be the case, but, regardless, what I was writing before my cat so rudely interrupted us was that it’s a cliche for some of us to shun Hublot, Clymer being somewhat emblematic of the trend.
It may also be a cliche to eventually embrace Hublot, as Clymer and others like him have done more recently. As longer-standing Swiss brands like Zenith and Audemars Piguet put out watches more or less indistinguishable from Hublots, there seems to be an awakening to the emerging aesthetic that Hublot started. For years, Hublot led the way into novel material-use, light weight, innovative mechanical solutions, and avant-garde skeletonized dials.
And yet I, and many who would similarly concede these crucial points, have remained reluctant to fully embrace Hublot the way we embrace more storied watch house like Rolex, Patek Philippe, or Audemars Piguet, each of which, it should be noted, have long offered offensively loud timepieces capable of drowning out Hublot’s high-wattage aesthetic.
So what was missing from Hublot? Why did the brand take so much heat for so long?
Was it the lack of a mid-20th-century tool watch? Well, Neither Audemars Piguet nor Patek had that, so. Was it the storied legacy of a great CEO – no, wait Hublot had Jean-Claud Biver, a punk disruptor of the Swiss watch industry at least partially responsible for reviving mechanical watches in the 1980s, so. Was it the name, admittedly a bit odd for native English speakers? Anyone who’s tried to properly pronounce Jaeger-LeCoultre (roughly: jzay-jzay-le-cxhout) would likely dismiss this explanation.
When it comes to the power of marketing and branding, we can only really speak for ourselves, and for me it appears that two things were missing from Hublot: a feline ambassador and the brand’s playfully self-conscious new slogan, “Own it.” This changes everything. It opens Hublot to a world of fun, and perhaps to a bit of doom-spending on the boom-boom aesthetic. But I’m prone toward the purely fun part.
Aside from the cleverly concealed demand that you must own (i.e. buy) an Hublot, the “Own it” slogan is a straightforward recognition that embracing Hublot’s audacious watches requires one to get over some internal impediment: e.g., a bearded coastal elite’s clinging to decades-old Ivy-League styles, or whatever holds you back. And if you can get over this psychological impediment, then you’ve said yes to something deep within you that wants to give loud luxury a whirl, to sabotage that disciplined sense of decorum and simply not give a fuck, to be as hedonistically demanding as my old cat Beau.
In order for Hublot to transform that nervous I’m not sure into a carefree yes, the brand had to say yes first. With the adoption of Karl Lagerfeld’s cat as an ambassador and the announcement of the “Own It” campaign, Hublot finally yelled Yes! with the distant stare of a molly-soaked neo-bohemian locking eyes with the disco ball in a Miami club DJ’d by a ripped 19-yr-old male model wearing silk Gucci pajamas you know are coming off during the second set. With Choupette front and center, Hublot basically said: This is who we are and we are going to own it! Hublot is modelling how to get over ourselves, how to loosen up, how to take ourselves less seriously.
Granted, this may not be the most audacious move for a loud-luxury brand digitally resonating with todays’ pre-apocalyptic algorithms, but for a Swiss watch brand to bring a famous cat named Choupette on as a brand ambassador is quite remarkable and – dare I say it – genuinely fun.
This is why I think it’s time for us post-preppy coastal elites to reconsider Hublot…and to do so not from our publicly touted sense of old-school good taste, but from the P.O.V. of that cat, Choupette, who, I presume based on my own experience living with domesticated felines for the past 55 years, seeks purr-inducing pleasure 24-7 and, had this extraordinary animal the frontal-cortex required to select a wrist watch, would probably tell everyone like me to pull the proverbial sticks out of our asses, strap on the most outrageous Hublot we can find, and hit the dance floor.
Starting today, I will heed Choupette. I will love Hublot.
If I could afford one, I’d get one of those all-red reference 441.CF.8513.RX Big Bang Unico Red Magic Limited Editions – or whatever redded-out watch Hublot has on offer – because it would be amazing with my bright red Italian motorcycle and probably awesome with a black tee-shirt and khakis, and it would probably inspire this tight-hipped man in his mid-50s to get out and Prancercize more often. I predict only good things would ensue if I owned such a timepiece.
Sometimes we need a brand to just hit a marketing bull’s-eye, which amounts to plainly saying the thing that everyone is already thinking. After many years hiding my adoration of Hublot – for fear of appraisal from uptight men just like me – I’m going for unabashed love.
I’m locking eyes with the disco-ball now, and my inner DJ is playing a dope Sly remix with a phat one-drop, and it goes:
I want to thank you
Choupette
for letting me be myself
again