They arrived in hoodies, hands buried in their pockets, eyes glued to their phones. Not to the dial of a watch, since they do not wear one, but to their phones where the Vinted app is already open and ready to upload a product listing written the night before while they were standing in line. The photo? Snapped hastily on the sidewalk, the watch still in its box. The price? €1,200. The description? “Never worn.” Of course never worn. It did not survive ten minutes on their wrist. In fact, it was never meant to.

Let’s call them what they are: the new pavement speculators. A generation raised on Nike drops, Adidas bots, and graphics card resellers, who woke up one morning to discover that luxury goods also came with waiting lines. And that the old guard of the industry, too busy talking about craftsmanship and manufacture, had not yet invented an anti-scalping bot. So they came, methodical, organized, perfectly indifferent to the octagonal bezel and everything it stands for.

Their entire watchmaking culture can be summed up in one sentence: “It resells well, bro.” They know absolutely nothing about Gérald Genta, they have never heard of Le Brassus, and the difference between an automatic movement and a quartz movement inspires the same shrug as the difference between Château Pétrus and a strawberry yogurt drink.

The absurdity reaches its peak when you realize that some of them are already on their third “campout” of the month. After Jordans and Supreme, now comes Swiss luxury. The territory changes, the ritual remains the same: arrive early, leave quickly, cash out.

One of them, interviewed by Canal-Luxe, delivered a line destined for the archives: “Wait, what’s the brand doing the collab again?” “Audemars Piguet,” he was told. “Oh right, AP. I saw that on Instagram.” There it is. That says it all. The icon born in 1972 in Genta’s workshop, the watch that redefined the history of horological design, reduced to an Instagram post glimpsed between two stories. And somewhere in its hushed offices in Le Brassus, the management of Audemars Piguet quietly collects its royalties while looking at its watches, the ones that, unlike these, will never end up on Vinted.