Meet the Christopher Ward X seconde/seconde/ 8-Bit Year of the Snake Watch

Johnny Davis
·4 min read
watch
Christopher Ward x seconde/seconde/ Snake watch Christopher Ward.

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Anyone who’s been paying close attention to the watch releases over the first 29 days of 2025 might have already detected one of this year’s big horological trends.

Snakes.

Louis Vuitton has launched a white gold model with a dial made from wood, straw and parchment, whose central motif is a hand-engraved and enamelled snake in shades of blue and green.

Vacheron Constantin put out a watch made from 18ct gold featuring a snake sat on a bed of leaves, made of opaque miniature enamel.

At the other end of the budget, Swatch announced something called the Blue and Golden Lithe Dancer, a plastic quartz watch featuring a multicoloured print of the reptile winding its way around its dial.

The watches have all been launched for the 2025 Chinese New Year – the Year of the Snake – which begins today.

China has a lot of well-heeled consumers – and, presumably, Swatch fans – so it makes sense for luxury watchmakers – and Swatch – to make limited-edition watches to appeal to them.

(Last year it was the Year of the Dragon. Step forward the IWC Portugieser Chronograph Year of Dragon, and the Bell & Ross BR 05 Artline Dragon. In 2023 China celebrated The Year of the Rabbit. Hence the Ulysse Nardin Classico Rabbit, the Vacheron Constantin Year of the Rabbit Métiers D’Art and the Hublot Spirit of Big Bang Black Ceramic Rabbit. We’re not making these up.)

It would be easy to be cynical about such horological wildlife opportunism.

But that’s not our job.

It’s the job of Romaric André, aka seconde/seconde/ – the watch designer and prankster behind such eye-catching launches as the Fifty Phantoms, a joint venture with the US brand Spinnaker that riffed on Blancpain’s Fifty Fathoms dive watch by covering its dial in tiny ghosts, launched for Halloween. The Manhattan Project, a play on a watch called the Manhattan by the watchmaker Maen, that added a trefoil nuclear symbol to the dial. And the ‘Bad Form’, a model that made an anagram of the name of the watch company Bamford and stuck a rotating two-fingered ‘V’ sign in the middle of the dial.

Now seconde/seconde/ has reunited with Christopher Ward.

snake
Christopher Ward

The new watch follows 2024’s collaborative Desk Diver, a watch that interpreted the watch world in-joke about office workers who wear chunky dive watches without having any intention of going anywhere near water, by decorating one of the brand’s C65 Aquitaine models with office-related puns, including a Post-it note emblem.

For the new collab the duo has riffed on the idea of a Year of the Snake limited edition with a unique version of Christopher Ward’s The Twelve watch, one that takes inspiration from early 8-bit computer games, specifically Snake.

snakey snake
Christopher Ward

The 40mm steel watch comes with a one-off ‘venom’ green dial, a reference to backlit LCD screens of yore, while a crudely rendered snake is illustrated working its way at right-angles across the dial, to devour the watchmaker’s twin-flags logo.

“Bonus bites”, appear in a ‘no-date’ date window located between the seven and eight o’clock positions.

The case back features the commemorative legend ‘CHEERS TO THE SNAKE YEAR(S)’.

Underneath, the snake reappears on the custom rotor, where it travels in a curve as the rotor spins with movement.

symbolic representation related to zodiac or astrology
Christopher Ward

“We’re used to hearing that watches, and especially vintage watches, are time capsules, or time machines, able to transport you back in time,” Romaric André tells Esquire.

“What I particularly like about this Twelve Snake is that it’s a hybrid of ‘fast forward’ and a ‘fast backward’. On your nostalgic days, the piece will appear as reminiscent of that sweet and comforting late-1990s era. On some other days, the ‘wishing-you-good-fortune-for-the-years-to-come’ vibe may bring you the energy and hope that are much needed when you project yourself in the future.

“So, it’s some sort of ‘a bull and a bear’, both encapsulated in a snake.”

The Twelve Snake x seconde/seconde/ watch is available via a pre-order window that runs from the start of Chinese New Year on January 29that 3 pm GMT (ie: today) to February 10th at 3 pm GMT.

Deliveries will start on a first-come, first-served basis from July.

Not for you? In which case: roll on, 2026 – the Year of the Horse.

£1,050 on a steel bracelet, or £850 on a rubber strap – in ‘venom green’ or black.

christopherward.com

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