Worn & Wound
Watches & Wonders: A Few Thoughts on Nostalgia, the 1990s, and Moser’s Streamliner Pump
Playing on nostalgia is nothing new for watch brands, but I’ve mostly been immune to it. Usually it’s for a period of time I wasn’t alive for, or a war I didn’t fight in, or an old car I simply don’t care about. But I’ve come to accept that I’m at an age where nostalgia for me is actually real history for many. My lived experience of hanging up phones, buying CDs that came in cardboard long boxes, and killing time in malls doing nothing at all might seem as foreign to someone 20 years younger than me as getting all misty about the Pan-Am logo does for my friends and colleagues at the heart of Gen-X. It was inevitable that a luxury watch brand would reach back into my childhood and pull something out like the Reebok Pump. The fact that it’s H. Moser is not particularly surprising given the brand’s recent history of challenging somewhat stodgy conventions of what it means to be a “luxury” brand in the first place. But it does make me feel a little old to know that something I have such a clear memory of from my youth is fodder for the watch nostalgia marketing machine. For those who have forgotten or are simply too young to remember, the Pump was a line of basketball shoes introduced by Reebok in the early 90s with a particularly enticing gimmick, at least to impressionable children who waited all week to watch NBA Inside Stuff every Saturday morning: the shoe’s tongue was topped with a rubber basketball “pump.” Pushing it inflated an air pock...
