GoKawiilFor a week now, Instagram’s watch fans have been losing their minds over what looked like leaked product images. Vivid plastic Audemars Piguet Royal Oak wristwatches in bright colors: navy and orange, pink, yellow, and green. Captions guessed about prices and launch queues. Comment sections argued over colors. None of it was real. Every image was AI-generated.
When Swatch and Audemars Piguet confirmed their Royal Pop collaboration on May 8, the teaser campaign left just enough ambiguity to allow the watch web to fill the void with its own vision. The result has been a weeklong hype cycle built not around the actual product but an AI-generated simulacrum of it.
So, when the real Royal Pop collection dropped on Tuesday, ahead of schedule (perhaps forced by the volume of fake images circulating), yes, it turned out to be genuinely different and interesting. But for a significant section of the audience that had already fallen for the fakes, it was genuinely disappointing.
Courtesy of Prompthaus
This is a new problem. When Swatch launched the MoonSwatch with Omega in 2022, publicly available AI image generators capable of flooding the zone with photorealistic versions of the watch from single-line prompts didn't exist. Even subsequent editions as recent as the Snoopy “Cold Moon” didn't elicit the social pile-on the Royal Pop has endured in the past seven days.
“The prelaunch hype has become a key part of it all, an enormously valuable part,” says Chris Hall, founder of the popular The Fourth Wheel Substack (and a WIRED contributor). “Today's audience is even more clued-in than it was four years ago. It makes it very hard for the real watch to surpass expectations or deliver a genuine shock of the new, especially when the whole world has been generating its own images of what it might look like.”
It didn't matter that Swatch had carefully tried to manage expectations by teasing the lanyards first, signaling clearly that this was a pocket watch—not worn on the wrist. Once the first few searingly vibrant plastic Royal Oak AI images hit Instagram, complete with plastic bracelets mirroring the iconic AP design, the algorithm kicked in. Soon, thousands were reposting wristwatch Royal Pops, while others set about designing their own takes, all as convincing as the last entirely unreal watch, willfully ignoring the obvious lanyard clue.
The dream was clear: Watch fans wanted the moon on a stick, fantasizing about owning a hyper-accurate low-budget version of an iconic high-end wristwatch that sells for $20,000, and no official Swatch teases leading to alternative outcomes were welcome.
The Real Deal
Disappointment aside, the Royal Pop Collection is a legitimately interesting proposal. A set of eight pocket watches made from Swatch's bioceramic composite in two styles, Lépine (crown at 12) and Savonnette (crown at 3, with a small seconds subdial at 6), and priced at $400 and $420, respectively.