The world of luxury offers endless examples of the problems companies can run into when they do something unexpected. Whether something is disruptive and captivatingly revolutionary or just off-putting and off-brand is something very hard to predict (and anyone who could do it reliably would make a killing). Of course, what exactly it is that constitutes a company’s identity is something about which you will get many different answers, depending on who you ask, but, in broad strokes, often a famous company’s basic language can seem a bit set in stone. When we first heard Chanel was doing a watch specifically intended for men, we didn’t quite know what to expect, but we were very impressed by the Monsieur de Chanel after a first look at Baselworld, and a chance to see the watch again, and to spend more time with it, was a chance to get a closer look, not just at the watch, but also at the ingrained prejudices and expectations that come with it.
Continue reading ‘In-Depth: The Chanel Monsieur de Chanel, And The Evolution Of The Gendered Watch’