We asked architect Matteo Thun, the new creative manager at Swatch, how he has laid down the lines of his work. “Rather than coordinating a series of always different free-lance contributions, as used to happen, we thought we would marshal this ‘creative chaos’ into a more stable framework. For the 1990 collection we have a group of five Italian, plus six German, British and French designers. These will be joined by Americans and Japanese on particular occasions. The collections are geared to the philosophy developed by Swatch over the years and are organized in three main lines: classic, sport, fashion. We get our starting points from fashion, with Pitti Filati, Interstoff and other events that anticipate designs, colors and theme trends. The difficulty is not to fall victims to a fashion diktat which is in any case more ephemeral than the Swatch product.”
Have you thought about highly transgressive models, or new dealings with? “We have defined the Christmas Special, which is going to be fantastic – non-conformist and great fun. As far as collaboration with artists is concerned, I am personally very much against it. The artistic message is inevitably an élitist one. Whereas I would like to cut out the hermetic stuff and to be comprehensible to all age groups. In this way we can keep up the quality mass appeal of Swatch, which I am convinced has not yet waned. It will depend on what we manage to put over.”