The Swatch Q, ref. SS07Z100: the seventh and final model in the Swatch x 007 limited edition collection, designed in collaboration with No Time to Die costume designer Suttirat Anne Larlarb, based on the Swatch Skin Irony collection of 2018, limited to 7,007 pieces worldwide, worn by Ben Whishaw as Q on his right wrist in Cary Joji Fukunaga’s No Time to Die (2021), where the watch designed for the man who invents gadgets is itself an exhibition skeleton piece that makes its own quartz mechanism deliberately visible, and where the retail version’s dial inscription “Q” at six o’clock was carefully omitted from the prop to preserve the character’s plausible deniability.
Cary Joji Fukunaga’s No Time to Die (2021) was the twenty-fifth film in the Eon Productions James Bond franchise and the fifth and final appearance of Daniel Craig as 007. It opened on September 28, 2021, after a series of pandemic-related postponements that had pushed its release from its original April 2020 date through two further reschedulings. The film grossed $774 million worldwide and concluded Craig’s interpretation of the character with a deliberate and final act of self-sacrifice that closed the narrative arc begun in Casino Royale (2006).
Ben Whishaw plays Q, the MI6 Quartermaster responsible for supplying Bond with the equipment that the missions require and that Bond subsequently returns, if at all, in states that Q’s laboratory is not designed to repair. The character, first played by Desmond Llewelyn in From Russia with Love (1963) through to The World Is Not Enough (1999) with John Cleese as a brief transition in Die Another Day (2002), was reimagined for the Craig era beginning with Whishaw’s introduction in Skyfall (2012): younger, more contemporary, more comfortable with the digital and data-driven intelligence architecture that had replaced the mechanical gadgetry of the Llewelyn era.
The Swatch Q SS07Z100 is on Whishaw’s right wrist in No Time to Die, visible twice when the character looks at his watch but never receiving the close-up that would allow the retail version’s “Q” inscription at six o’clock to be legible on screen. Bond Lifestyle, the authoritative reference for the franchise’s props and wardrobe, confirmed that the watch appears on the right wrist and that the screen prop omits the “Q” logo present on the retail limited edition, making the retail version “not 100% screen accurate.” The logic of the omission is consistent with the character: Q is the man who builds things for other people to use, not the man who wears his own name on his wrist.
More on the film: imdb.com/title/tt2382320
The Skin Irony and the Visible Movement
The SS07Z100 is built on the Swatch Skin Irony, a collection introduced in 2018 as Swatch’s ultra-thin dress watch line with stainless steel case and brushed dial surfaces. The Skin designation refers to the case thickness, which at 5.9mm makes the Skin Irony one of the thinnest watches in the Swatch catalogue: the name is the proposition, a watch thin enough to wear as a second skin on the wrist rather than as a statement object rising from it. The Irony designation, applied to stainless steel Swatch models since 1994, distinguishes the metal-cased line from the resin-cased original collection.
The specific feature of the SS07Z100 that makes it appropriate for Q is the exhibition window in the dial, described by Watch Nation as made of mineral glass, that exposes the internal quartz movement: the coil, the circuit board, the battery compartment, the mechanical and electronic components that drive the hands. The battery is external to the movement, allowing rapid replacement, a design feature that Watch Nation describes as “a great allusion to the gadgetry that serves as an inspiration for this watch.” A watch with its mechanism made deliberately visible, designed for and worn by the character responsible for MI6’s technical department, functions as a quiet self-referential statement: Q can see how his watch works because Q can see how everything works.
The dial is silver-brushed steel with triangular blue indices. The inner bezel ring is finished in matte red. The two hands are finished in deep red. The strap is brown leather printed in a red-trimmed tartan pattern, a detail that establishes the character’s British identity through a textile reference as conventional as it is precise. The overall aesthetic of the watch is the intersection of technical transparency and British eccentricity: a skeleton exhibition quartz on a tartan strap, for a character who drinks Earl Grey tea and finds Bond’s attitude to equipment professionally distressing.
The watch appears in a limited edition of 7,007 pieces, a number chosen as an obvious reference to the Bond code designation. The packaging opens like a laptop, with a keyboard graphic in which the letters S, W, A, T, C, H are highlighted in red: Swatch’s design department at its most playful.
Swatch x 007: The Collection and Its Six Companions
The SS07Z100 is the seventh and final model in the Swatch x 007 collection released in conjunction with No Time to Die. The six preceding models, each limited to their own specific production run, drew their design vocabulary from original film posters and opening title sequences of six earlier Bond films: Dr. No (1962), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), Moonraker (1979), Licence to Kill (1989), The World Is Not Enough (1999), and Casino Royale (2006). Each watch in the series was designed around the visual iconography of its source film rather than around a specific character or prop, making the SS07Z100 the only model in the collection that was built to represent a specific character and worn by that character on screen.
The Swatch and Bond relationship has a longer history than this collection suggests. Swatch is a subsidiary of the Swatch Group, the Swiss holding company that also owns Omega, the brand that has supplied James Bond’s screen watch since GoldenEye (1995). The Swatch Group’s connection to the franchise therefore operates simultaneously at the luxury level through the Omega Seamaster and at the accessible level through the Swatch Q, a distribution of the Bond association across two entirely different market positions within the same corporate ownership structure. Bond wears the Omega. Q wears the Swatch. The hierarchy is appropriately observed.
The Right Wrist and What It Means
The detail that Q wears the Swatch on his right wrist is not incidental. In watch-wearing convention, the right wrist is the non-dominant wrist for left-handed individuals, and the deliberate placement of a watch on the right wrist by a right-handed person can function as an eccentric personal statement or as a professional habit derived from the need to keep the dominant hand unencumbered. Q is a character who works primarily with his hands, at keyboards and workbenches and control panels, and the right-wrist placement suggests a man who has thought about where the watch needs to be relative to his working hand. Whether Whishaw made this choice deliberately or whether it was specified in the costume brief, the result is a character detail that places the watch in a position where it is visible to the audience without interfering with the character’s work.
The two moments when Q looks at his watch in No Time to Die are not moments of suspense, in the convention of the thriller where a character checks the time against a countdown. They are moments of the kind of administrative awareness that defines Q’s function in the narrative: monitoring the schedule, tracking where Bond is supposed to be relative to where Bond actually is, maintaining the operational awareness that is the Quartermaster’s permanent condition. The Swatch Q is on his wrist. It tells him what time it is. What he does with that information is, as always, Bond’s problem.
More on the Swatch x 007 collection: swatch.com/en-gb/collections/007 and on Q’s complete wardrobe in the Craig era: jamesbondlifestyle.com/product/swatch-q-watch
Technical note: Swatch Q, ref. SS07Z100. Seventh and final model in the Swatch x 007 limited edition collection, released in conjunction with No Time to Die (2021). Based on the Swatch Skin Irony collection, introduced 2018. Stainless steel case, 42mm diameter, approximately 5.9mm thickness, ultra-thin Skin Irony profile. Silver-brushed dial with exhibition mineral glass window exposing quartz movement: coil, circuit board, battery compartment. Triangular blue indices. Swatch logo at 12 o’clock; “Q” at 6 o’clock on retail edition; “Q” logo omitted on screen-worn prop. Matte red sloping inner bezel ring. Deep red hands. Brown leather strap in red-trimmed tartan pattern. Battery external to movement, accessible for rapid replacement. Water resistance 30 metres. Limited to 7,007 pieces worldwide. Designed in collaboration with No Time to Die costume designer Suttirat Anne Larlarb. Packaging opens in laptop form with SWATCH letters highlighted in red on keyboard graphic. The watch appears on Q’s right wrist, visible twice in the film without receiving a close-up. Worn by Ben Whishaw as Q in No Time to Die (2021), directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, the twenty-fifth James Bond film and the fifth and final appearance of Daniel Craig as 007. Bond’s watch in the film is the Omega Seamaster Diver 300M; Omega and Swatch are both subsidiaries of the Swatch Group.
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Details
Brand:
Marketplace Price
€400
Movie Year:
2021
As seen on:
Movie/TV Series:
