After-Hours At Tate Modern With Swatch

Likes, posts, and overall engagement might be the metrics by which we measure the success of a party these days, but when Swatch creative director Carlo Giordanetti and I debrief the morning after the timepiece brand’s art- and surprise-filled Art Journey activation in London, he proposes a new benchmark: Does it give you goosebumps? When I later think about Giordanetti’s test flying home over the Atlantic, I can say that I did feel something akin to frisson during the after-hours tour of Tate Modern — and when the collaboration between the museum and Swatch was finally revealed in a delightfully imaginative way.

The evening began on the top floor of Tate Modern’s Blavatnik Building with a drinks reception, during which an international group of press and influencers from as far as Japan and Australia sipped cosmos and chased down lobster pasties while overlooking St. Paul’s Cathedral. We were instructed to decipher the table toppers’ cryptic questions, like “When was the last time you were ‘spiraling?’” (answer: right now, bro), before embarking on a whistle-stop tour of a few works from the museum’s collection. Mondrian, Léger, Malevich — we got the sense that these were further clues to the long-awaited watches, which none of us had been told anything about.

Outside, Swatch-wrapped black cabs were ready to whisk us to a studio space in Soho, where the drag queens who’d performed Kesha’s “Tik Tok” (get it?) earlier at afternoon tea welcomed guests with margaritas. From my vantage point on the serpentine couch, I got a better look at how the crowd had interpreted the confounding dress code of “come as you are”: with a lot of suiting, including one Canadian tuxedo. I watched as the content creator known as Sausage Lord — or Annie, as she introduced herself the previous night at The Standard — work the branded backdrop with her crew.

After we sat for dinner at rows of Kartell Ghost chairs, our drag-queen hosts began calling out table numbers pulled from a bingo cage. Apprehensive attendees lined up before entering through a mysterious red-curtained doorway… which revealed a life-size maze in which each of the seven art-inspired Swatch x Tate watches was displayed in its own immersive “secret garden” installation. The Chagall room, for example, housed a harlequin-print-wearing acrobat and a topiary sprouting from the bottom half of a mannequin, while the Louise Bourgeois gallery contained a massive spiral and piles of rose petals in the corners, which made me think of another artist: Félix González-Torres. Turn another corner and you would run into Miró, where you could sit on a suspended crescent moon and ask the obliging boiler-suited attendant to snap a pic.

As with any of these types of happenings, bottlenecks would form as guests jammed into each section of the maze — but it wasn’t as much for the photo opp as it was to admire the poetic motifs that had been both blown up and scaled down to be made wearable on the watch bands and faces. (Matisse was the clear favorite with its cool transparent effects.) Once we exited, Esquire creative director Nick Sullivan and I talked about the time periods that were chosen before the conversation drifted to the hand-sewn leather bags he’s been making for friends after seeing the process up close at Hermès. At my table, John Singleton’s seventh divorce came up, too, but as the last guests lingered over quenelles of chocolate mousse and biscuits, my mind kept going back to the art. That’s the spiral they were alluding to, I concluded, as another black cab took us deeper into (or was it out of?) a memorable night.

The Swatch Art Journey is open to the public through March 23.