M&Co Rereleases Tibor Kalman's Watches That Make You Work for the Time

Three wristwatches designed by Tibor Kalman went back on sale this week through the website of M&Co Labs, and one of them, the "10-4-1," sits in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. The rerelease, led by Kalman's son Alex and widow Maira, revives a series from the late 1980s and early 1990s that treated the watch face not as an instrument of efficiency but as a surface for commentary on time itself.

Tibor Kalman, who died in 1999 at age 49, was the editor in chief of Colors magazine and created album covers for The Talking Heads. The New York Times once called him a "self-styled bad boy" of graphic design. He pushed his profession to face its social responsibilities, tackling race and AIDS in Colors, and ran client work for musicians and the Times Square Redevelopment Corporation under M&co — the "M" standing for his wife and collaborator, the artist and children's book author Maira Kalman.

What do the watch faces actually do?

Each of the three rereleased models interferes, gently, with the primary function of a watch:

• 10-4-1 removes every hour numeral except 10, 4 and 1, leaving the wearer to reconstruct the rest.
• Onomatopoeia swaps some numbers for small pictograms — a cat stands in for 9, an egg for 12.
• Askew scrambles the numerals around the dial, apparently at random.

All three carry the same inscription on the case back: "Waste Not A Moment."

The watches became a flagship product for M&co, sold alongside other clever objects such as a paperweight shaped like crumpled paper. Alex Kalman describes them as having, "for lack of a better word, a bit of a timeless design quality."

Why rerelease friction now?

For interface practitioners, the interesting claim is about usability orthodoxy. The entire industry now optimizes for frictionless interaction; these watches do the opposite on the most elemental interface there is.

"It's very funny that there's all this effort for frictionless design, here is something so elemental as a watch face, but one that creates friction in trying to read the time on it," Alex Kalman said. The impulse to remove friction existed in Tibor's era too, but Alex argues it has since escalated: "It's come so much further than what he was initially reacting to."

That escalation is precisely the argument for the rerelease. A small forced delay in reading the hour turns a reflexive glance into a deliberate act. Alex frames the value in human terms: "The faces themselves, which is obviously really where the character is, have a lot of soul and wit and humanism. And I think that's a really nice thing to offer people in our increasingly slick technological landscape."

How did the watches come back?

After Tibor's death, Maira focused on her own work and licensed the M&co Labs product line to other firms. The watches stayed in distribution for years, but the supplier relationship eventually ended and the watches fell out of production.

More recently, Maira and Alex decided to produce new batches of a few models. Alex, a filmmaker and founder of Mmuseumm — a mini-museum installed in a former freight elevator in lower Manhattan — describes the move as a tentative first step toward rebuilding M&co as a family business.

"All the products, as the family likes to do, look at the conventions of things and play with them a little bit," he said. The original watches were a way of "thinking of incredibly common vernacular everyday items that are part of our lives, and how to play with them with that particular sensibility and share those ideas through everyday products, rather than just through design or editorial work."

The timing carries an extra layer. With time now read mostly on digital devices, a glance at a phone for the hour may also deliver a new follower or a catastrophe. An object whose only job is to slow that glance down — to make you pause over where the clock stands — has arguably gained meaning since the watches first appeared.

There is also the nostalgia factor: the watches are classic symbols of a distinct pre-smartphone moment in product-design history, iconic to a design-savvy audience.

If this first run sells, physical retail follows. "Either on the corner of Canal Street or the MoMA Store," Alex joked — a range that itself spans the oddball and the institutional, which is a fair description of where these watches have always lived.