Swatch Vibs on a Pangolin, Not Just a Leopard, for This Year’s Locarno Watch

The LOCARNO79 PAY carries the festival’s leopard on its strap, but the more interesting story this August happens inside a video installation about the animal that keeps getting mistaken for one.

Every August for close to three decades, Swatch has shown up in the small Swiss city of Locarno with a new watch built around the same animal: the leopard, or pardo in Italian, that gives the Locarno Film Festival’s top prize, the Pardo d’Oro, its name and its mascot. This year’s version, called LOCARNO79 PAY, arrived on Swatch’s own site and in select stores worldwide starting July 9, ahead of the festival’s 79th edition, which runs from August 5 to 15. What makes this year’s rollout worth a closer look isn’t really the watch itself, though it is a solid, wear object. It’s the fact that Swatch used the same announcement to introduce a video instal about pangolins, an animal that has nothing to do with the festival’s branding and everything to do with a joke about it.

 

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The watch belongs to Swatch’s New Gent line, a 41 millimeter round case that sits at 9.85 millimeters thick with a 47.4 millimeter lug to lug span, numbers that put it comfortably in the range of a day, unisex Swatch rather than anything oversized. The case and glass are both made from Swatch’s bio sourced material, the plant derived plastic the brand has been rolling into its Originals family for the past couple of years as a lower impact alternative to standard petroleum based plastic. On top sits a black dial finished with a sun brushed effect, radiating lines that catch light differently depending on the angle, printed with a single bright yellow numeral and swept by black hour and minute hands alongside a yellow seconds hand, the one moving part that keeps drawing the eye back to the dial’s one accent hue.

The strap is where the watch commits fully to its theme: a faux fur, leopard printed calf leather band, paired with a black leather loop printed with the event’s name in yellow and closed with a matte yellow bio sourced buckle. It is, by design, a watch that photographs well and reads instantly as festival merchandise, which is exactly the brief Swatch has been working from for years. Reference SO29Z158-6000 identifies the model in Swatch’s system, and it runs on a standard quartz movement rated to 3 bar water resistance, a reminder that despite the styling this is still a mass produced Swatch rather than a mechanical collector’s piece.

None of the individual parts here are new to Swatch’s toolkit. Bio sourced cases and glass have been showing up across the brand’s Originals range for a couple of seasons now, part of a slow material shift the company has made without turning it into the headline of any single release, this one included. The sun brushed dial finish is similarly a recurring technique across Swatch’s catalogue rather than something invented for Locarno, and the printed leather loop with an event name on it is a format the brand reuses for most of its festival and city specific specials, just swapped out for whichever text and colorway a given release calls for. What makes LOCARNO79 PAY distinct is really just the combination: this particular dial finish, this particular strap treatment, and this particular yellow, assembled around a single case that Swatch has used, in one variation or another, for years.

Swatch pairs a sleek black min dial with a textured leopard-print strap and bold yellow accents for its Locarno-inspired special edition.

 

That reuse of parts is worth noting because it explains why the watch is priced the way it is. A limited run built on an established case, an existing movement, and materials already in production keeps costs down in a way that a genuinely bespoke design would not, and it is a large part of why Swatch can put out a new festival edition nearly every year without each one becoming a significant investment for the brand or the buyer.

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The leopard reference only makes sense with a bit of festival history attached. The Locarno Film Festival, founded in 1946, hands out its top prize each year as a Pardo d’Oro, a golden leopard statuette, and the animal has become the event’s de facto mascot the way a laurel wreath stands in for Cannes. Swatch has been the festival’s main partner for years now, and its annual Locarno special has leaned on that leopard motif in different ways depending on the edition. Two years ago, the 77th edition’s watch, LOCARNO77, took a completely different visual approach: a square dial referencing celluloid film stock, a black strap with a double loop detail printed with the number 77, and the leopard confined to a small pattern printed on the back of the case rather than worn openly on the strap. This year’s design flips that logic, putting the leopard front and center on the strap itself rather than hiding it on the caseback, which makes LOCARNO79 PAY a louder, more overtly branded object than its immediate predecessor, even before you get to the yellow accents.

Swatch’s relationship with Locarno goes back further than any single watch design, too. The brand has held the main partner position at the festival for well over a decade, a sponsorship that predates the Swatch Pay technology built into this year’s model and has outlasted several redesigns of the New Gent case itself. Over that stretch, the festival has grown from a respected but comparatively niche stop on the European circuit into one that regularly draws major international premieres to its outdoor Piazza Grande screenings, one of the largest open air cinema venues in Europe, seating tens of thousands of people on a single night. Swatch’s presence there has grown alongside it, moving from a sponsor logo on programming materials to something closer to a full scale activation, complete with its own dedicated event space near the festival’s center.

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The PAY in the name refers to Swatch’s built in contactless payment chip, the same Swatch Pay technology the brand has folded into a growing share of its Originals lineup, letting the wearer tap the watch at a compatible terminal instead of pulling out a card or phone. Swatch’s own marketing frames this as a convenience for someone moving through a busy festival schedule, red carpet appearances included, though the feature works exactly the same way it does on any other Swatch Pay model outside of Locarno. The watch is priced at 130 euros through Swatch’s own channels, while the Locarno Film Festival’s official shop lists it separately at roughly 111 Swiss francs, a gap that likely comes down to currency conversion and regional pricing rather than two different products. One detail worth flagging honestly: Swatch’s own festival page describes the watch as arriving with special packaging, while at least one authorized retailer’s product listing describes it shipping in a standard paper box, and it isn’t fully clear from public information whether that’s a discrepancy in how retailers describe the same box or an actual difference between markets.

The payment chip works through near field communication, the same standard used by most tap to pay bank cards, linked to the wearer’s card through a companion app rather than a separate bank relationship with Swatch. It has quietly become fairly standard across a meaningful share of the brand’s current lineup rather than something reserved for special editions, which is why the PAY in the name reads less like a technical distinction and more like a label confirming which version of the Locarno design a given buyer is looking at.

 

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The watch is only half of what Swatch built for this year’s festival, and arguably the less interesting half. On August 5, the opening night of the festival, Swatch is hosting the official opening party at Locarno’s Magistrale venue, and using the event to debut a video installation called Precarious Pangolins, created by British artist Sam Wilde, who has been in residence this year at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel, the brand’s long running artist residency program in Shanghai where visiting artists live and work on site for stretches of three to six months. Wilde, who trained in natural sciences at Durham University before switching careers from financial trading into full time illustration and pattern design, has built a recognizable body of work around richly patterned, nature inspired scenes, and Precarious Pangolins began as one of those pieces, a dense, jungle set illustration first developed years before this commission, built around pangolin mothers scrambling across precarious, snakes and ladders style terrain while trying to keep their young from falling behind.

For Locarno, that existing world gets reworked into a video installation, and the joke embedded in it is fairly direct: the pangolins in the piece are shown evading detection in a jungle setting, a small visual dig at the festival’s leopard mascot, since the animal most trafficked by poachers worldwide isn’t a leopard at all but the pangolin, listed by the IUCN as under threat of extinction across all eight of its species. Swatch’s own description of the piece calls it a scene that hides a message with real weight underneath its play surface, and it is a rare instance of a brand’s festival programming doing something more pointed than simply repeating a mascot. The installation runs for the full eleven days of the festival, alongside a small fleet of curated vehicles shuttling festivalgoers between Locarno’s main train station and the Magistrale each night.

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Underneath the merchandise and the opening night spectacle sits the part of Swatch’s partnership that has the clearest stakes: the Swatch First Feature Award, a CHF 15,000 prize the brand funds annually to recognize a standout debut feature film in the festival’s lineup. It is a comparatively modest sum next to some of Locarno’s larger competition prizes, but it is specifically aimed at first time filmmakers, a group that tends to have the hardest time securing funding and distribution attention regardless of how a film is received critically. A debut feature that screens at Locarno and picks up a prize, even a smaller one, gains a credential that can matter more to a young director’s next project than the award money itself, since festival prizes function as a kind of shorthand for distributors and financiers who don’t have time to watch every film in a given year’s lineup themselves.

Swatch has framed its overall involvement with Locarno, now well into its second decade as main partner, as an extension of a broader design identity the brand has held since its founding in 1983, when it built its early reputation partly through connections with view artists rather than through traditional watchmaking credentials alone. That same instinct shows up in the Swatch Art Peace Hotel program that produced this year’s Precarious Pangolins install: rather than commissioning a single piece of merchandise art from an outside studio, Swatch runs an ongoing residency, housing a rotating group of artists in Shanghai for months at a time and letting whatever they make there feed back into the brand’s public facing programming, Locarno included, whenever the timing lines up.

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None of this makes LOCARNO79 PAY a particularly rare object. Swatch has never treated its Locarno specials as scarce collector pieces in the way a limited run mechanical watch might be marketed; the brand does not publish production numbers for the line, and the watch is sold openly online and in a selection of Swatch stores rather than through any kind of raffle or waitlist. What distinguishes each year’s edition is mostly the design lang layered onto a familiar New Gent case, whether that means a celluloid inspired square dial one year or a leopard print strap the next. Seen against that backdrop, LOCARNO79 PAY reads less like a departure and more like Swatch settling back into its most literal interpretation of the festival’s branding after a more abstract design two years prior, while quietly using the surrounding programming, the pangolin installation especially, to say something a little more complicated than a wallet sized leopard print ever could on its own.