Branding and the internationalisation of luxury are massive industries precisely because of their performative, self-congratulatory metaphors, which rarely stop talking. Still, given Bernard Arnault's claim, CEO of LVMH (the world's leading luxury goods conglomerate), “[l]uxury is the ordinary of extraordinary people and the extraordinary of ordinary people”, luxury seems unable to exist without its equally indispensable counterpart, non-luxury. Each depends on the other for definition, aspiration, and, of course, market segmentation.
By Branislav Radeljić
The Audemars Piguet (AP)–Swatch collaboration represents the merger of two radically different regimes of consumption: a product that is nearly impossible to obtain, accompanied, in many AP boutiques, by a curated attitude of condescension and selective hospitality, and a product available virtually everywhere, from the Swatch website to airport kiosks, shopping malls, and street-corner retailers.
Swatch effectively provoked AP into surrendering a portion of its sacred exclusivity to consumers who could not care less about multi-year waiting lists or the absurd expectation that one must first buy several unwanted watches (some of which lose half their retail value on the secondary market) to prove oneself “worthy” of purchasing a Royal Oak. In other words, Swatch, with characteristic plastic indifference, has collapsed the AP-related ritual and, more broadly, that of other luxury brands that insist on exclusivity as proof of authenticity.
Admittedly, luxury connects the rich and the rest through second-hand markets or when the wealthy give away luxury items to servants, charities, or others. Accordingly, the treatment of luxury, either as something special or something easily disposable (trash), exposes the close link between luxury and social status, and not much more than that.
Even when luxury is expected to respond to aesthetic glorifications, consumers often reduce it to snobbery and competition. As a subject chiefly concerning the upper classes and the preservation of status therein, it is understandable that, in Georg Simmel's words, “as soon as the lower classes begin to copy their style, […], the upper classes turn away from this style and adopt a new one, which in its turn differentiates them from the masses.”
What deals such as those between Swatch and Audemars Piguet (or Omega and Blancpain) demonstrate is that luxury is perhaps most successful not when it remains exclusive, but when it stages exclusivity as a mass spectacle. What was once reserved for a tiny clientele can now be approximated in bioceramic form for the price of a weekend impulse purchase.
In this sense, the collaboration does not abolish hierarchy; it merely lets consumers participate in its aesthetics without the inconvenience of genuine admission. At the same time, the collaboration exposes the fragility of luxury’s symbolic authority. If the visual language of the Royal Oak can survive translation into colourful plastic without collapsing entirely, then much of its prestige may have rested less on craftsmanship than on scarcity, controlled access, and social signalling.
Simmel’s observation remains instructive here: once the masses gain access to the symbols of distinction, elites must find new ways to separate themselves. The AP–Swatch project accelerates this process almost comically. It lets consumers buy the appearance of exclusivity while forcing established collectors to search for ever more obscure and financially unreasonable forms of differentiation. Luxury thus continues its endless cycle of social distancing, except now the distancing itself has become the product.
Here, the more uncomfortable question is how existing AP owners (and those registered and hoping to get one) react when they see crowds with whom they imagine they share absolutely nothing lining up outside Swatch boutiques to purchase a Royal Pop, only to list it on eBay the following morning at several times the retail price. Does this spectacle inspire admiration for the genius of the AP–Swatch collaboration, or does it provoke a more unsettling realisation—that luxury may be far closer to disposable consumer frenzy than its mythology would like to admit?
The same watch language once associated with wealth and cultivated taste now circulates through TikTok livestreams and speculative flipping; many of these “new owners” cannot even spell the full name; the furthest they get is “A.P.” In this context, the Royal Oak aesthetic becomes less a marker of refinement than a transferable logo for temporary status acquisition.
Consequently, the AP–Swatch collaboration can also be understood as a peculiar form of luxury democratisation. As Pierre Bourdieu observed in his analysis of “distinction and pretention,” “[a]dvertising for luxury goods systematically exploits the association of a product with a group,” while “[i]n no other field are institutions more overtly defined by their clientele than in the luxury trades.” Luxury, in other words, does not merely sell objects; it sells admission into symbolic communities structured around status, exclusivity, and controlled belonging.
The AP–Swatch collaboration is culturally significant because it temporarily disrupts this exclusivity by extending Audemars Piguet's visual and symbolic language beyond its traditional clientele. Consumers who would never be admitted into the social rituals surrounding a Royal Oak, whether because of wealth, purchase history, or boutique politics, are suddenly invited to participate in the aesthetic performance of luxury at a radically lower price point.
The collaboration therefore democratises not haute horology itself, but access to its signs, codes, and fantasies.
This process also confirms Patrizia Calefato’s observation that “[f]eeling unique often means feeling omnipotent.” Luxury consumption promises symbolic transformation: the watch is never simply a watch, but a portable declaration of distinction. Yet the AP–Swatch project complicates this promise by mass-producing the experience of exclusivity itself. Thousands of consumers can now purchase a fragment of the Royal Oak mythology without enduring the financial and social gatekeeping traditionally required by the luxury industry.
Naturally, this democratisation is selective and deeply ironic. AP retains its actual exclusivity, while Swatch distributes its aesthetic vocabulary to the masses in colourful, disposable form. Still, the collaboration reveals that contemporary luxury no longer depends entirely on scarcity of ownership, but increasingly on the circulation of recognisable symbols across social classes. The result is a curious compromise between elitism and accessibility; luxury remains hierarchical, but its imagery becomes public property.
In this sense, the collaboration exposes a contradiction at the heart of modern luxury culture. The industry depends on exclusivity to preserve distinction, yet simultaneously requires mass visibility to maintain desirability. AP–Swatch resolves this tension by allowing consumers to buy proximity to luxury rather than luxury itself, a democratisation not of wealth, but of appearance and participation in the spectacle.
Branislav Radeljić is a London-based academic, consultant, and expert witness. His scholarly interests focus on European and Middle Eastern political and socioeconomic developments. He has authored and edited numerous publications and has regularly provided services to government entities and non-governmental stakeholders. You can read his previous contribution here.
