![]() Most watches of this era were meant to be staid and unobtrusive. Though my tastes and aesthetic sensibilities were still evolving at this point in my life, I knew this watch was special (and still do) I had never before seen a simple, three-hand everyman’s watch executed with such personality and fearlessness. And just under 12 o’clock, the one-word logo called out to me: Lip. The hands looked like black toothpicks, resplendent against the silver of the dial. The numerals, black with gold surrounds, read like a strange combination of art deco and the Hebrew alphabet-the “2s” looked like “Zs,” the “6” like a “G,” and the “9” like a hangman’s cross. The lugs jutted out of the case like insect claws, curling out and back in toward the wrist. But this watch bore a decidedly different aspect. The watch resembled my grandfather’s Hamilton, a retirement gift for thirty years of distinguished service: stainless-steel case, silver dial, svelte in profile. It was then, at that moment on that winter day of 1999 while the warm wind blew outside, that I first saw a Lip watch. “Bonjour,” he said warmly as he rolled up his sleeves, revealing a pair of hairy wrists, and began carefully loading the bag with my items. He swept aside the newspaper and cracked open a paper bag, smiling that smile at me. He could tell I was young and American: a student or a backpacker, intentionally adrift, stumbling through his country. The man looked up and gave me a smile that contained equal parts warmth and pity. He was reading a newspaper that was spread out on the counter’s surface like a map of enemy targets. At the counter was the same balding middle-aged man wearing a dark gray turtleneck and several days’ beard. I returned to the same convenience store where I had purchased a disposable camera that morning, and I immediately began filling a wire basket with items: a brie-and-apple sandwich wrapped in foil, a bottle of Bordeaux, a bottle of water, a razor, gum. I decided I would buy a sandwich and a bottle of wine and find somewhere to sit outside and enjoy the unseasonably warm weather, and I was practically giddy at the thought of having found a new purpose to my day. ![]() The Cité interested me a great deal, but I could not spend another day touring through it, so I walked down the hill to wander around the village below. There was not much to do in Carcassonne, even in that forgiving winter, but there was the Cité: On the summit of a hill on the right bank of the River Aude, this medieval stone citadel still stood, in the same spot first occupied by the Iberians in the 5th century BCE. A warm wind blew through the Cité that winter, blew until it seemed that June would arrive at any moment and force all the tourists to remove their heavy woolen coats and tie the sleeves in clumsy knots around their waists. In the winter of 1999 I was twenty, and I was alone in Carcassonne. Collector Guide LIP, the French Watch Brand That Started an Aesthetic Revolution ![]()
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