Rolex: Daily Mail ad1927

Today, almost wherever you look, fashionable faces peer out from magazine pages and billboards suggesting that you wear a Brand X watch. Like it or not, this marketing ploy works not merely by illustrating an attractive timepiece, but also by engendering a dream, a phantasm that supposedly casts off the humdrum mantle of daily routine and transports you into the rarefied atmosphere of make-believe, that illustrious milieu of trendy actresses and actors, tennis players, Formula 1 drivers or even everyman’s favourite spy, James Bond.
This sophisticated concept first appeared in 1588 when Christopher Marlowe asked of Helen of Troy, ‘Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships …’ This was followed up in 1927 when, for the first time a relatively small watch company named Rolex took out a full-page advertisement in the Daily Mail newspaper in England for their Oyster watch using a photograph of Mercedes Gleize who had swum the English Channel in just over ten hours wearing one. Longines also launched the Lindbergh Spirit Collection that same year, but used Charles Lindbergh’s monoplane rather than the man himself.
It was a few years before other leading brands caught on to this notion, but today consumers are enticed by the beautiful people to join them in a world where good looks, achievement and stardom are attained merely by the wearing of a wristwatch. Here, for your pleasure are some of them.




Maurice Lacroix: Roger Federer, Milus: Barbara Becker, Cartier: Monica Belluci, Baume & Mercier: Meg Ryan, Baume & Mercier: Kiefer Sutherland



Rolex: Diana Krall, Longines: Harry Connick Jr., Omega: Anna Kournikova, Omega: Pierce Brosnan



Omega: Nicole Kidman, Tissot: Michael Owen, Patek Philippe: generations’ boots, Ebel: Claudia Schiffer, Breitling: John Travolta



Audemars Piguet: Angunn, Audemars Piguet: Nick Faldo, Audemars Piguet: Michelle Yeoh, Guess: Anna Nicole Smith, Guess: Paris Hilton



Raymond Weil: Charlise Theron, Longines: Audrey Hepburn, Longines: Humphrey Bogart, Panerai: Mike Horn



TAG Heuer: Uma Thurman, TAG Heuer: Tiger Woods, TAG Heuer: Sharapova, Rolex: Andy Roddick


Source: December - January 2006 Issue

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