The Patek Cubitus is a watch we all know and about which anyone and everyone has expressed an opinion. Widely panned/loathed/derided/mocked in the watch enthusiast community (a phrase worth unpacking, although maybe in another story – does it even mean anything anymore?) the Cubitus has been criticized for its size, design, price, apparent general off-brandness, and just about anything else you can think of. It’s now been several months since Cubitus was launched in October of last year, and the responses were at least as interesting anthropologically as they were horologically. There was a great deal of skepticism expressed and I think it’s fair to say that not everyone who commented on the initial launch was a fan of the design.

Since then, however, pretty much all the initial furor has died down – in fact, it’s pretty much totally subsided, which is remarkable considering how strongly negative some of the initial views were. On a certain level this is just a natural outcome of the rage economy that pervades social media, where most of the more vehement comments played out, but I think it’s still worth noting – maybe because the phenomenon is so ubiquitous – that outrage in most cases and especially on social media tends to have a very short half life, and that today’s cause célèbre is tomorrow’s business-as-usual. The Cubitus has now started to appear on celebrity and presumably, non-celebrity wrists as well (the celebrity wrists are the only ones I’ve seen them on so far as I don’t travel in circles where the Cubitus is likely to show up) and having spent its ire on the subject in the first – well, really, just week or week and a half after the launch – watch social media has apparently moved on.

I wasn’t at the launch event in Munich but I did have a chance to see all three of the new models in person, albeit briefly, and, naturally (and this is true of just about every watch I’ve ever seen first in pictures and then seen in person) they gave a markedly different impression in the metal. They were obviously Patek watches; they were obviously related by several design cues to the Nautilus; and they were eye-catching – my personal favorite was the two tone model, which may say more about how rooted my own tastes are in nostalgia for the 1970s and 1980s than it does about the watches themselves. They also seemed like, you know, watches – the whole idea of expending energy on being outraged seemed a little silly when in the presence of the actual timepieces.

The whole thing reminded me of something else, which is the phenomenon of the Balenciaga Triple S sneaker. I should preface this by saying that I’m not a sneakerhead, that my shoe collection is conspicuous mostly for its monotony, and that my sole exposure to the sneakerhead community was an interview I did years ago with Ronnie Fieg, founder of Kith and renowned master of the art of the collab and the high buzz new product drop. Generally my taste in sneakers stopped developing when I started wearing Converse All-Stars at sixteen, and nowadays it’s confined to buying the same pair of black and grey New Balance sneakers every four months, which I’m probably going to do until the day I die or the day they stop making them, whichever comes first.

However, despite the fact that I don’t notice sneakers as a general rule, I (and a lot of other people) certainly took notice when Balenciaga launched the Triple S sneaker in 2017.

I thought it looked patently, indisputably ridiculous. Too thick, too chunky, pointlessly bloated, a chaotic clash of colors and shapes that looked as if they had been forced together at gunpoint, and I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Hypebeast did a street intercept reaction video which produced some pretty salty takes, including “I think they’re ugly and impractical. There’s nothing redeeming about these … whoever designed these were just like: How much can we f*ck with sneakerheads and make the worst shoe ever made that they still would probably buy?” and “$800 USD?!? I’ll give you 800 reasons why I wouldn’t buy this shit.” (Why Hypebeast chose to euphemize the eff word and not the ess word is something I wonder about as an editor).

GQ’s Jake Woolf was only a little less sharp, noting, “ … there is perhaps no better example of Gvasalia's ‘ugly is actually pretty’ vibe than the brand's new "Triple S" sneakers … ugly sneakers have been trending all year, but the ‘Triple S’ sneakers take that concept to the extreme. Their upper looks like the kind of running sneakers a man in his later years would wear for maximum arch support, and their hiking-inspired laces would be more at home on a pair of all-weather boots … they don't just look chunky in photos, either. If you're a guy who already wears shoes on the bigger side, expect the ‘Triple S’ sneakers to look like a pair of toy trucks on your feet.”

In the natural course of events it turned out that the gaudy, deliberately ungainly and willfully hideous Triple S became the hottest sneaker of the year. The ink had hardly had a chance dry on the derisive initial reactions than the Triple S became nearly impossible to buy; first it sold out everywhere you looked and then the waiting lists sold out before new inventory could hit the stores. By July of 2018, the New York Times’ Jon Caramanica, who almost against his will found himself becoming obsessed with the Triple S, spent eight months trying to find the model he wanted to no avail, and eventually tried to scratch the itch by buying a pair of replicas, which he wore to a MOMA opening and which nobody pegged as fakes (to pretty much any modern watch enthusiast this is all going to sound all too familiar). The Triple S is sort of the blobfish of sneakers – on the off chance you’ve never seen one, or seen a meme featuring one, the blobfish was once voted The World’s Ugliest Animal, which it turns out was the exact reason for its notoriety and popularity. As with the Triple S, its hideousness is a feature, not a bug, at least when it comes to virality.

I still think the Triple S is hilariously misconceived but this is after all the sort of thing that happens when familiar design tropes become too familiar and you need to figure out how to stand out – the pendulum swings toward weird until it can swing no further, and then inevitably the style equivalent of a Thermidorean Reaction sets in. Watchmaking in the decades I’ve been covering watches has gone through several of these. Like the Triple S, the apparently off-brand and debatably gauche bulk of the Cubitus is intentional (to be fair, it’s also not really a bulky watch; it’s wide but for its width, fairly flat) and as with the Triple S, it has become highly desirable and essentially unobtainable in record time. It is in fact, now a part of the landscape rather than the excrescence on the Body Horological that it was taken for at launch (at least by some people).

This is not to say that going off-brand always works out, but I think it helps put things in perspective to remember that Patek Philippe didn’t exactly decide to pull the plug on classical and complicated watchmaking; it’s not as if they’ve gone out of the minute repeater business, and last year’s launch of the Golden Ellipse on a bracelet shows – or seems to show – that the company knows breaking too completely with its established identity wouldn’t be such a hot idea. Wholesale rebranding, on the other hand, can be really dangerous; Bremont for instance is struggling to find acceptance for its rebrand, and outside the watch world, Jaguar’s rebrand – announced, perplexingly, with obviously artificial renders of EVs in colors that looked like they were taken from a Bratz doll lookbook – produced considerable backlash as well.

Bremont and Jaguar were also both struggling economically, which aside from the fact that Cubitus is a watch, not a rebrand, is the other big difference; Patek launched the Cubitus from an enviable position of strength in the market. Watches & Wonders 2025 is coming up in a little over a month and it’ll be interesting to see what if anything the company does with Cubitus – a line extension with slightly smaller models, or the launch of a model or models with shaped movements, or the creation of more complications, are all possibilities (some more likely than others). The whole thing just goes to show you, and this is a good thing to remember as the hype machine for new releases starts to wind up, that the outrageous becomes the buzzy at least in some cases, with surprising rapidity and that indeed, a shock to expectations can actually be a precondition for buzz, as long as it doesn’t go too far.

PS – I have noticed and readers probably have too, that it’s been over a month since the last post here and I’m going to try and exercise some discipline in terms of publishing more regularly and often. I’m not going to have any more free time this year than last, so I’m going to try and make more efficient use of the time I’ve got. Thanks for reading!