Supreme Can Move $14,000 Luxury Watches, Too

What Supreme does better than just about anyone else in fashion is sell out of products: hoodies, tees, hats, beanies, vests, backpacks, you name it. If a box logo can fit on it, Supreme can move it in an instant. Yet I was still skeptical that Supreme would be able to make magic happen again this morning, with a foursome of watches made in collaboration with Jacob & Co. set for release. These are gaudy watches: set with 50-plus white diamonds and paired with an alligator-skin strap. And they are priced commensurately, at $12,000 for the 40mm and $14,000 for the 47mm. We’re not just trying to move box-logo tees anymore, Toto. So, I bet you can imagine what happened next: before you could even weigh the merits of the red alligator strap against the black one, all four watches were gone.

I wasn’t alone in my astonishment, either. “Jesus I just saw a £13k watch sell out in seconds,” a top comment on Supreme’s subreddit reads. The magic of Supreme has always been its ability to release high-quality highly desirable goods at reasonable prices—its most coveted piece, the T-shirt, typically costs around $50. Supreme created exclusivity not through high prices but by choking supply. And for two decades the brand’s sold pieces that are mostly obtainable even to high-school hypebeasts trying to stretch an allowance. A luxury watch is foreign territory.

And what a watch! The Jacob & Co. “Time Zone” model is the watchmaker’s base model. For context, other pieces from the jeweler replicate roulette wheels and show an oil pump in motion. Purists would argue the “Time Zone” is really more like a piece of jewelry than a proper watch: the movement inside the watch is quartz rather than mechanical, according to the Jacob & Co. website. What customers are paying for here are the diamonds, the alligator strap, and the Supreme box logo laid on the face of the watch. (The timepiece is serving as a teaching moment for the brand’s new-to-watches fans. One on Reddit argued, “It’s actual diamonds. Not quartz.”)

Still, the leap from tees to watches is a big one—and Supreme cleared it easily. The brand proved it can expand beyond its hypebeast tee lovers to hypebeast watch lovers. (The brand’s ability to move true luxury fashion has long been in the bag: items from its collaboration with Louis Vuitton were priced just as high and moved just as lightning-fast.) The lines between all these people and categories are growing hazier by the day. Christie’s auction house, the domain of luxury timepieces, is now also a place that brings rare Supreme items up for sale. And luxury watches, typically tightly guarded and sacred items, are now a massive concern for streetwear luminaries like Virgil Abloh and Matthew Williams, who customized an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak through his brand Alyx. Supreme has always straddled the line between luxury fashion and streetwear, and now the brand is pulling timepieces into its universe, too.

Originally Appeared on GQ