Tibor Kalman, the graphic designer, was known for confrontational stances; a “self-styled bad boy” of his profession, as The New York Times once described him. But Kalman—who was the editor in chief of Colors magazine and created album covers for The Talking Heads—produced plenty that was witty and warm before he died a quarter of a century ago, at age 49. Notably, this included a series of charming and celebrated wristwatches that his son, Alex, brought back into production.
Analog watches may not seem like the most buzzy category in 21st-century retail, but these have, “for lack of a better word, a bit of a timeless design quality,” Alex Kalman says. In fact, design aficionados may recognize the three watches that have gone on sale this week through the website of M&Co Labs, Tibor’s design-product studio. They were originally part of a larger watch series tracing back to the late 1980s and early 1990s in which the elder Kalman treated the watch face as a space to subtly comment on time itself.
The watches became a flagship product for M&Co. In different ways, each gently challenges the functionality of a watch. One of them, dubbed “10-4-1,” eliminates all the hour numbers except for those three; it’s in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Another, “Onomatopoeia,” replaces some numbers with tiny pictograms: a cat for 9, an egg for 12. The third, “Askew” simply jumbles the numbers, apparently at random.
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