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I was ten years old when I first encountered the Swatch. I was flipping through the pages of Seventeen, idly rubbing perfumed strips on my wrist, when a glimmer of high design caught my eye and never let go. There, starkly positioned on a blank white page, was a black plastic watch covered with mysterious symbols. Bacteria-like symbols. Japanese kanji, in fact, but this was 1987. Hello Kitty was the way you greeted a pet; sushi was regarded as a health risk; anime was a Jungian reference misspelled. Nonetheless, that watch spoke to me. “Own me,” it said. “Wear me.” That Christmas, I obeyed (with help from Santa). And thus began my lifelong affair with Swatch—the greatest product, I humbly submit, in the history of watchkind.

In the event you missed the Great Swatch Explosion (you never admired the sophisticated double-watch look on a classmate’s wrist, never positioned your sleeping bag under the face of a giant Swatch wall clock—oh, how I wanted one!), Swatches are the zany plastic watches that rocketed onto the market in 1983. Before then, watches were pricey and breakable, or, in the case of Timex, sturdy and plain. Swatches, on the other hand, were cheap, gorgeous, and hard to destroy. The company has since released a new line of watches every season, and, along the way, jewelry, eyeglasses, and even a car. And while I defy you to name another watch company with the cojones to bring an automobile to market (Breitling? Rolex? Cartier? Non!), we shall limit our present discussion to the Swatch watch itself, a holy union of artistry and performance.

First, the artistry: Fifteen years before Michael Graves began flinging spatulas around Target HQ, Swatch hired artists to design its products. Before Swatch, a watch might have consisted of a white face with a leather band. “Stiletto,” a Swatch designed by Mexican painter and sculptor Cisco Jiménez, was made of lime-green plastic and festooned with images of an egg beater, a bunk bed, a stiletto heel impaled on a dagger, and an oven that appeared, somehow, to be bleeding. The late video artist Nam June Paik—better known for airborne performance art and magnetized TVs—designed a Swatch, as did Yoko Ono, Keith Haring, and hundreds of other artists whose genius defied the strictures of good taste and brought high art to everyday accessories. With their help, Swatch injected the workaday world with other-worldly visions, including “Missing Spoon,” a gingham picnic-scene watch; “Space Sheep,” a sheep-heads-floating-in-space watch; and this season’s hot-orange number, “Instantaneous Fresh.”

As for performance: In an era of routine corporate overpromise and underachievement (Eye cream that makes you look younger! Beer that makes you more popular!), Swatch actually underpromises and overachieves. For example, Swatches are virtually indestructible. While company literature modestly describes them as “water-resistant,” I can attest to their absolute waterproofness. At the height (or depth) of junior high, a black kanji Swatch remained strapped to my wrist continuously for three years. I washed the dishes, I swam in the ocean, I dove through a Slip’n Slide made of garbage bags—without removing the watch once. And it lasted for more than a decade.

This is not to say Swatches are perfect. As with any relationship, Swatch and I have had our ups and downs. There was that ninety-four-degree day when, in the middle of a church picnic, a Swatch melted to my wrist. Then the harrowing encounter involving my mother, my second Swatch (the Cisco Jiménez model), and a jet of instant-dry aerosol hairspray. There was also, sadly, that afternoon in college when I opened the battery compartment of that very first Swatch to find something I can only describe as “corrosion explosion.”

These incidents, however, are but specks of dust next to the blaze of Swatch majesty. What’s remarkable is that Swatch has survived being a trend without ever bowing to the pressure of trends. While Martha and the Gap offer us products carefully designed to have universal appeal, Swatch continues to inject the idiosyncrasies of art into our daily lives. This season’s collection features a silver-and-blue model cryptically titled “Bathroom Smiles” as well as a watch covered with line drawings of rabbits caught in flagrante delicto. Title? “Bunny Sutra.” But it’s perhaps the Swatch company’s literature that best describes the watches, in language as insouciantly surreal as its wares: “A selection of watches to welcome our space brothers to Planet Earth.” One day, I hope to personally entertain these space siblings by designing a Swatch myself. Until then, I’ll be flashing my wrist toward the sky. Space brothers, welcome.