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Welcome to '90s Week, where we're revisiting the raddest (and most underrated) watches of the decade, plus the trends and innovations that defined the end of the 20th century. Plug in your dial-up modem and grab a Crystal Pepsi. We'll be here all week.
Double Team is a 1997 film starring Mickey Rourke, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Dennis Rodman. I can't tell you the plot because you will never forgive me or recover. All you need to know about this film is that Dennis Rodman's character wears a Swatch Chronograph, a 1996 Chrono Swatch Cool Pack to be precise, thanks to Logan Edwards for an entire afternoon spent researching, sometimes in actual books, and thanks to Swatch for confirmation.
For those of you who were born in the '90s or too young at the time to care about the NBA (or who Madonna, or Carmen Electra, dated/married/got an annulment from) Dennis Rodman was sort of like the Liberace/Björk/Cookie Monster of professional basketball. He was maybe the greatest rebounder of all time and a two-time NBA Defensive Player of the Year, but he did his best to overshadow being good at sports by being bad at sportsmanship, once kicking a cameraman in the balls and another time head-butting a referee.
Off the court, his signature moves embraced a sort of extravagant nihilism, being weird or disobedient for its own sake. He wore a wedding dress for a book promotion and "married himself." He skipped out on the Chicago Bulls the night after winning Game Three of the 1998 NBA Finals to go to WCW Nitro, where he hit Diamond Dallas Page with a chair.
Swatches and Dennis Rodman are a match made in heaven. Swatches are all about abstract colorful geometric designs, their faces can look a lot like Rodman's hair art. As for this Swatch, introduced in the early '90s, the chronograph complication makes the watch more celeb-worthy. It's a far cry from a Patek, but at least it has a distinguishing feature, and the not-expensiveness of it ticks the punk-rockish box Rodman was always going for, or hoped he was going for when he was mostly (in addition to being a great ball player) just a garden-variety addict who spent the 2000s getting sober only slightly less publicly than he used.
Rodman aside (as well as the "flamboyant arms dealer" named Yaz he portrayed in Double Team), a 1990s Swatch Chronograph is a watch I'd love to own. It really sums up an era: Bad taste masquerading as art, overblown excitement over the tiniest hint of technological advancement, individuality crassly and unapologetically expressed through highly noticeable branding. A Swatch watch with a chronograph is pretty funny – like, why does something whose most salient characteristic is being trashy, fun, and loud even have this very sophisticated complication? How was it that Dennis Rodman was himself, but also just so good at basketball?
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