2022 has already been a pretty stacked year for watch releases, but OMEGA and Swatch have blown everyone else out of the water with their new collaboration.
In case you’ve missed it, it’s called the BIOCERAMIC MoonSwatch collection: a collection of 11 Swatches modelled after the iconic OMEGA Speedmaster Professional Moonwatch that each represent a planetary body in our solar system.
Colourful and distinctive, the really exciting thing about these ‘MoonSwatches’ is their price point: AU$380. That’s right. Less than $400 for a bloody ‘Speedy’! It’s hard to understate just how radical this collaboration – a first for these two titans of the Swiss watch industry – is… Or how much it’s riled up fans.
People have been lining up at Swatch boutiques around the world for days just to get the chance to cop a MoonSwatch, from Soho to St. Moritz – but there’s perhaps no city on the planet where the lines have been longer than Sydney, Australia.
Sydney’s Pitt Street Mall is no stranger to long lines. You regularly see sneakerheads hoping to cop rare Adidas or Yeezy sneakers camping out in front of the entrance to Westfield. This time, however, it’s people looking to cop MoonSwatches.
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As of publishing, the line is spilling outside of Westfield, down the Pitt Street Mall and around the block down Market Street. Ironically, the line snakes past a bunch of other watch boutiques: it’s right in front of TAG Heuer and Grand Seiko’s boutiques, actually. Breitling and Rolex’s boutiques are just across the street, too.
I’ve seen crazy lines in the Sydney CBD before – some of the queues outside Louis Vuitton and the Apple Store immediately spring to mind – but I’ve never seen a line as long as this. Honestly, I didn’t know there were this many watch nerds in Sydney, let alone Australia.
It speaks volumes about how influential, groundbreaking and exciting this collaboration between Swatch and OMEGA really is, as well as the enduring popularity of the iconic Moonwatch.
So, some details: All 11 MoonSwatch designs are crafted from the Swatch’s patented BIOCERAMIC, a unique mix of two-thirds ceramic and one-third material derived from castor oil. BIOCERAMIC is a really cool material: it’s sustainable, visually distinctive and tough.
There’s never been a ceramic Moonwatch so that in itself is exciting, but what’s even more exciting is how bold some of the colour options in the collection are. The bright yellow of the ‘Mission To The Sun’, the warm red of the ‘Mission To Mars’ and the pastel blue of the ‘Mission To Uranus’ are particular highlights. (Don’t be childish.)
Each of the 11 models features subtly different design cues, but all are remarkably faithful to the original Moonwatch: the famous tachymeter scale with a dot over 90, those distinctive Speedmaster subdials and chrono pushers… Yes, they have a quartz movement and the subdials are arranged differently, but it’s still clearly a Moonwatch.
Honestly, we could spend all day talking about these watches, but we’re weighing up whether we should join the line ourselves. Find out more about the OMEGA x Swatch MoonSwatch collection here.