The hype around the Audemars Piguet x Swatch “Royal Pop” collection threw the watch world—and then the real world—into chaos last week. With resale values expected to surge dramatically in the days after the initial release, things got intense. Some stores couldn’t even open because the crowds were so rowdy. Now, some of the lucky few who scored a Royal Pop are turning to the secondary market to cash in—and damn are they cashing in. Want to know which is the most valuable? Just check out our ranking. —Jonathan Evans, style director
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The collaboration watches have been selling very quickly, at high prices, on the secondhand market.
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The launch of a watch rarely causes crowd-control issues. But Royal Pop—Swatch’s colourful collaboration with Audemars Piguet—turned shopping streets over the weekend into scenes usually reserved for sneaker drops and Black Friday sales. Lines snaked around city blocks. Fold-out chairs covered pavements overnight, all operating under the same understanding established during the MoonSwatch mania a few years ago: love it or hate it, if you want one at retail, you have to earn your place in line.
The collaboration has been ambushed with attention far beyond watch lovers. Such fixation led to store closures across the globe on May 16 (the official launch) drawing criticism from watch enthusiasts, dismayed by the chaos unfolding outside boutiques. But the message is obvious, whether you’re flipping or fervently longing to tie this lanyard timekeeper around your neck, everyone wants a Royal Oak (of sorts) to call their own right now.
With purchases capped at one watch per person, per store, per day, hopeful buyers have already turned to eBay, Chrono24, and StockX in search of their future octagonal companion. And with eight colourways in circulation—scarcity making fans far less picky than usual—the question quickly becomes less about getting one, and more about which Royal Pop has emerged as the launch’s standout favorite.
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What even is taste?
Taste can be easiest—or perhaps only?—described indirectly. In 1964, Susan Sontag wrote in Notes on “Camp” that “taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response.” She argued that taste is active and unruly, not something one can just subscribe to, not something that can arise from consensus. The pursuit of taste shouldn’t be straightforward. “Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea,” she adds.
Is taste a commodity? Today, we often describe it as such. It’s something—a hardened idea—that you either have or don’t. We think this way because we’re lazy. We owe that to the Algorithm. We recently acquired abundant access to the things from which one builds a sense of taste—music, film, fashion, information—and this abundance cultivated decision paralysis. We invented the Algorithm to help us sort through it all. First it helped us, then it overtook us. There was a time, roughly the period covered by Kyle Chayka’s viral 2024 book, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, in which the worry was that the algorithmic mainstream was sanding down nuance of every kind, creating a big, fat, boring, Millennial Gray–colored middle. People without taste have always relied on convention to create the appearance of taste, and algorithmic factions are the most accessible and familiar source of convention in history: Spotify’s big shuffle button makes it easy for us to start listening to music without thinking about what we’re listening to; TikTok feeds us visuals distinct enough to be engaging without pushing our boundaries.
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I find myself thanking the TV gods every day that I am not an awards voter. There is simply so much great TV in the world right now —and even better actors giving trophy-worthy performances in them—that it's downright criminal to choose only a handful to reward each year. Thankfully, I can just shout out an unlimited amount of performances worth paying attention to in the pages of Esquire.
In 2026 so far, The Pitt —and its top-to-bottom stacked call sheet—has already come and gone, along with Paradise and Industry , which both turned in series-best seasons. And the show-of-the-summer conversation is slowly ramping up, with Widow’s Bay and Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed leading the charge. (Apple TV? Save some glory for the other streamers.) All of them, of course, feature a ridiculous amount of talent: Noah Wyle, Matthew Rhys, Sterling K. Brown, Tatiana Malsany, and so many more.
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