Last Updated on 11/09/2024 by Arun jain
As the owner and creative director of British shoe brand Grenson, Tim Little always wears his own designs. But often, he said, he bypasses his legs to let people admire what’s on his wrist: a 39-millimeter stainless-steel TAG Heuer Monaco.
“People see it in meetings — I can see them looking at my wrist,” Mr. Little, 61, said during a phone interview from his home in Rye, about 70 miles southeast of London, where he and his wife, Julia, also have a home. . “People come up to me and ask me about it, or people say, ‘I have a watch like that’ or ‘I had one of those’ or ‘I love Monaco'”
Mr. Little has three distinctive square-case timepieces, but not at the same time: the first, a gift from his wife, was stolen, and the second disappeared on a business trip. “Ever since I first wore Monaco, I’ve never been able to do without it,” he said. “That’s something that’s really important to me.”
He said he became aware of the Monaco about 35 years ago, when the original model — introduced by the Heuer brand in 1969 and produced for less than a decade — was all that was available. (Heuer was acquired by TAG Group in 1985.)
“I couldn’t have afforded one of the originals,” said Mr Little, who worked in advertising at the time. Besides, he added, “there was no real internet back then, so it was impossible to find.”
He settled on a rugged TAG Heuer 2000 dive watch he bought at Harrods for around £1,000, which he tends to wear these days.
TAG Heuer introduced its first Monaco in 1998, based on the original design and with a black dial. A blue-dial version followed in 2003; It was based on the Monaco worn by Steve McQueen in the 1971 film “Le Mans”.
“When I read an article that said they were re-releasing the original blue-faced one with a square dial, I went crazy,” Mr. Little said. “From then on, it was like an obsession.”
The Littles were planning to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary, belatedly, at Cliveden House, a luxury hotel in Berkshire, just west of London. As she thought about the perfect gift for her husband, Mrs. Little said in a recent interview, she knew Monaco was “something he really loved.”
“I guess, in the back of my mind, maybe I thought if he didn’t want to wear it, I’d wear it, because it was so beautiful,” she said.
At a pre-dinner cocktail in the hotel bar, she presents the watch to Mr. Little.
“It wasn’t a shock that she knew I liked it,” he said, “but it was a complete shock that she would buy it.”
Three years later, in 2006, they got a different kind of surprise: A clock had been stolen from a metal desk on the ground floor of the Littles’ home while the couple and their three children slept upstairs.
Mr Little bought a replacement with insurance money, a purchase he described as a bit surreal. “It’s really strange for you to buy something of that value without that huge emotion,” he said, “because all the emotion was around Julia’s original gift.”
“I felt a little betrayed at the first watch,” he noted. “It was like a pet dying and then you buy another pet and you feel guilty about the first one.”
Then in 2009, as he was packing to go home from a business trip to New York, he noticed the replacement was missing. “By this point, I feel like a complete fraud,” he said. “I feel like I’m screwing up this watch somehow and it must be something to do with me, not the watch.”
With another insurance check, he bought the Monaco he wears today, a chronograph or stopwatch, with a skeleton back.
“It was a relief to buy it and have Monaco back on my wrist,” he said.
(He joined Grenson in 2005, and he and his wife bought the company in 2010. He also ran his own self-titled shoe line until 2020.)
Years later, Ms Little said, she still thinks about the other watch: “It’s still, to this day, sad, and so is the other one, but obviously Tim had this watch, so he’s going to keep buying it. “
Post Tim Little loves the Monaco watch so much, he has three appeared first New York Times.