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Diving is supposed to be fun. As one doofus on 30 Rock once said about the scuba, “It’s a whole ‘nother world down there.” You can spot fish, hunt for treasure, and boop sharks on the nose. (Can you tell I’ve never dived before?) But a new watch collaboration from Seconde/Seconde/ and Isotope asks you to forget about the fishes and the sweet boopable sharks and consider another potential outcome of diving: death.
Seconde/Seconde/ is the pseudonym of the watch world’s favorite prankster, Romaric Andre, who modifies vintage watches with clever designs to crack jokes and process cultural happenings. Andre manages to stuff more sharp commentary into a watch dial than you’ll find in an entire episode of E! News. (A recent favorite crossed the word “Prince” off Rolex’s square-dial watch and replaced it with the phrase “I’m King Now, Brits” for King Charles’s coronation.) He has an uncanny ability for finding watches he can place in the conversation with whatever is happening in the world: When LeBron James became the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, he took a watch from the obscure, now-defunct brand Record and placed a basketball at 6 o’clock.
This skill came in handy again while developing Seconde/Seconde/’s new macabre take on the classic dive watch with Isotope. Andre treated the brand’s name as an anagram and flipped it into Otopsie (which sounds like “autopsy”). He turned the second hand, meanwhile, into a flatlining EKG, and madethe dial blacker than wherever Sandra Bullock let George Clooney drift off to in Gravity. Point being: There’s never been a watch more obsessed with death than this one. That deserves some sort of celebration. The £900 (roughly $1,120) watch is limited to 50 pieces and on sale now at Isotope’s website. I reached out to Andre to talk about the new collab—and why he doesn’t actually want humor in the watch world.
When did you start Seconde/Seconde/? Where did the idea come from?
I started to work under the Seconde/Seconde/ name around 2018. I spent the 10 years prior to that in a startup I co-founded, which was at the intersection of electronic devices and high-end horology. We never managed to be profitable, and in 2015 I had to close the company. I was really down. Fed up. Lost. My confidence was super low, because I basically found out I was not good at running a “business.” I wanted to stay connected with this watch industry, but unlike my previous venture, I wanted to do something on my own, without the need for raising millions—something small where I could be the only boss. Buying vintage watches and trying to "twist" them sounded kinda feasible. I knew it could be a bit controversial, which is never bad.
Did you feel like the watch industry was missing humor?
Not really. I’m not an advocate for “more fun in watches,” actually. I consider the watch industry as an establishment, and the establishment has the right and probably the duty to stay rigorous and serious. The more serious an establishment is, the more room it leaves to “weirdos” like myself to twist it, to play with it, to bring another perspective. So I’m not really rooting for a change in the watch industry about that. The vast majority of the market is not asking for “funny timepieces.” What I’m doing is not for everyone, and should remain niche. I’m happy to grow my little garden outside of main street.
How did you connect with Isotope? What made them a good fit for what you do?
The good fit for me always comes from the idea, the concept. If the concept is good, interesting, and unexpected then the rest will follow. This is always better and easier if there is a human fit also, but my driver is mostly the excitement I feel when I find an idea relevant to me. With Isotope, the human fit was there, too. José, the founder, is super passionate and into details. We’re both able to lose hours on some stupid details, not necessarily concerning the product. That’s an important marker to me. People that irrelevantly lose their time on some micro details nobody cares except themselves. I could feel that pattern with José, and then I could feel the bromance was not far away.
What is the idea behind the watch you came up with?
The idea with Isotope came with a context. Isotope was so far kinda bringing fun and colors around diving watches. So I wanted to go the opposite way. I wanted to go dark. I wanted to suggest how diving is dangerous, and as a generalization, how living is dangerous. I wanted to go “Memento Mori” with watches.
You use watches as a canvas for humor or to connect with something going on in culture. Why do you think watches are a good way to express these big ideas?
I did not know at the beginning, but watches ended up being the medium I found myself using. I did not know [it would work] before trying it. All my irony, mockery, and sarcasms are not forming what I would call “ideas.” I’m more playing the devil’s advocate (which is always a comfortable approach). And watches are a good material to play with and to twist because, as I said before, they are the establishment. They are solid. They are timeless. They are serious. They are majestic. Therefore they are begging for satire!
In your opinion, what is the “funniest” watch?
The funniest watches to me are the most complicated ones. I truly respect all the work and science and dedication that goes into the making of super complicated timepieces. Really. I love those pieces and the geniuses who are working on them. I admire those people. But I also find it really funny to know that those super smart mechanical watches are quite dumb in comparison with any ‘70s solar-powered Texas Instruments kindergarten calculator. Life is tough.
If you could work on any single watch and put your spin on it, which would it be? Why?
The watches you wear do not define you at all—despite what we may feel or think. So I would replace all the watch dials with mirrors to help us remind ourselves that “You define you, period.”
