The watch seemed to spring from nowhere, a creation, conceived by the dirty mind of a sixth-grade boy, that somehow materialized directly onto Drake’s wrist. The Richard Mille RM 69 watch the rapper wore to an NBA playoffs in 2019 game seems to borrow from the contemporary practice of sexting: it uses three panels to display a random combination of words that should never be uttered before midnight. (At the game, Drake’s was set to “I’d love to kiss your p**sy.”) Quick as it came, the watch disappeared, hopefully stuffed where it belonged under a mattress. And then it reappeared this year on the wrist of Travis Scott. And then MMA fighter Connor McGregor showed off a piece from Jacob & Co. that costs more than $2 million and features a hidden scene of a man and a woman caught in a very private moment. Suddenly, the sex watch was everywhere. But while these watches seem like the raunchy invention of the 21st century, there is a long history to these pieces.
Any watch that displays erotic scenes or uses technical mechanisms to show people bumping uglies is technically known as an “erotic watch.” The idea dates all the way back to the 17th century. (The earliest pocket watches date to the early 1500s.) Erotic watches most frequently boast either static sexual images, or literal moving figures, powered by the watch, that look like they’re actually partaking in the act at the push of a button.
And while they seem designed more for private use than anything else, they were most often purchased by the nobility to break out as party tricks. “It was really for entertainment more than anything else,” says Nelson Lucero, Ulysse Nardin’s US VP of sales. The type of entertainment differed depending on the region. In England, where the Catholic church cast its mighty frown on these provocative pieces, they were often used for satire: showing consorting bishops and nuns was a way for these people to tweak the conservative ruling body. In relatively more open France, these pieces were much more straightforward—the scenes on sex watches there were more art than satire. However, not all of these pieces were meant for public consumption. “The people who could afford these types of products were commissioning works around their particular interests, whether it was a lover, spouse, or anything like that,” Lucero says. Often, high-ranking men going away to serve in the military—leaving for years at a time—would have sexy paintings deposited in their pocket watches to pull out at lonely moments.
This is the long and lurid history of erotic watches that brands today cite as a reason for carrying on with that tradition. Erotic design was one of the elements the brand Ulysse Nardin turned to after the “quartz crisis” devastated the watchmaking industry in the ‘70s. During this time, many watch brands pushed for new ways to differentiate themselves from the new and infinitely more affordable quartz watches. Ulysse Nardin was hit particularly hard during this era, and was eventually acquired by a group of investors intent on rebuilding the house in the early ‘80s. “One of the pieces that we offered to revive the company was an erotica hour striker,” says Lucero.
Ulysse Nardin was not alone in this thinking. Blancpain’s watches are business in the front and Caligulan party on the back. An example from Chopard could similarly be worn to work without anyone suspecting a lewd scene on the back. Some of these pieces were clearly in line with the British tradition of skewering those in authority—sort of like a very expensive and wearable political cartoon. Watchmaker Sven Andersen made a piece featuring Bill Clinton engaged in a menage a trois with Monica Lewinsky and…his saxophone. Like much comedy from the time, these satirical pieces were often made to shock and are offensive, obscene, and often misogynistic. Some argue that erotic watches in general make watch collecting, a hobby already pointed at men, even more of a boys club. The pieces, which almost universally feature cisgender and heterosexual couples, certainly can't be called inclusive.
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Lucero, on the other hand, considers UN’s pieces to be more like art, referring to watches with miniature paintings on the dial that depict a naked mermaid and a land-walker hooking up, and a watch with an automaton—a mechanical device that follows a set sequence of movements—feature that makes one pair of lovers thrust and the other, peeping from behind a curtain, give their partner a hand. (The watch uses a minute repeater function that chimes out the time audibly in a series of what are technically described as “dings” and—you can’t make this stuff up—”dongs.” So, as this video illustrates, the time 11:59 would be chimed out as “10 dongs, 3 ding-dongs and 14 dings”.)
After a heroic turn as a post-crisis savior decades ago, these watches are once again coming out of whatever dark rooms they were hiding in. Drake is the obvious starting point: the $750,000 Richard Mille RM 69 he wore to an NBA playoffs game in 2019 put these erotic timepieces back on the map. The watch’s straight-to-the-chase nature is the point for Richard Mille: the RM 69 serves as a rebuke of those chaste-seeming erotic watches, the ones that hid their true nature on casebacks or behind secret covers. “On the RM 69...love and eroticism proclaim themselves proudly and clearly in words,” the brand’s website reads.
Drake isn’t a one-off. Travis Scott also procured and started wearing an RM 69 earlier this year. Not to be outdone, Jacob & Co. also has its own erotic pieces: the Caligula and the Rasputin, the model McGregor owns. Both conceal a NSFW scene behind a window that slides out of the way. Jacob & Co. intends to strike, with some watches boasting unhidden scenes out front, and others concealing what they’re really about. “It’s the best of both worlds,” a representative for Jacob & Co. tells me. “You have a high-complication timepiece that is extraordinarily gem-set, and you can see the erotic automaton whenever you want, on demand, so it is discreet enough to be worn daily,” they say of the watch completely covered in 178 diamonds with a slide pusher that reveals what is, basically, pornography.
It doesn’t seem out of bounds to suggest that erotic watches are set for an even bolder public profile. After a year lost the pandemic, brands like Suit Supply, Jacquemus, Diesel, and others have made sex the center point of their new campaigns. If sex is back in fashion, why wouldn’t the same apply for watches?
Despite the advent of magazines and the internet, the purpose of these horny watches hasn’t changed much over time. For Lucero, his most recent sale of an erotic watch went to a client in Florida who “uses it very much as a conversational piece,” he says. He’ll take it out and show off how it works and the pictures behind it. “It's fun, it's funny, and it's different,” Lucero adds. Apparently what qualified for a decent party trick centuries ago still counts for a good time in 2021. It turns out that men, no matter the time period, really do only want one thing.
