Jisa Shaji
Long before skating turned up at the Olympics, the most interesting art a lot of people owned was sitting on the underside of a deck they were about to destroy. Skulls, hands, cartoons, lettering nobody could read. You picked a board for the picture as often as for the shape, then you spent a season grinding it off. That was the deal.
The kid who took it all the way out
The astronaut on this dial comes from the same instinct. He is not surveying anything. He got to the edge of everything, looked at the rings of a planet, and read them as a handrail.
Anyone who has skated a city will recognize that way of seeing. Ledges stop being ledges. Handrails stop being handrails. A loading bay is a run up, a bench is a challenge, and everyone walking past sees furniture. It is a small private rewiring of the world, and it never really switches off.
He rides the rings with a gold sky behind him and flecks of color drifting past. The rings run off the edge of the dial, so the line he is on never actually ends.
One brush, one dial
Every one of these dials is painted by hand, one at a time, by a person holding a brush. Each carries small differences you can find if you go looking, and each one finishes a little apart from the last.
It also means the artwork gets to stay. A deck graphic had a season in it. This one sits under sapphire on steel, and it will outlast whoever buys it. The painting is the part you are paying for. The watch is what keeps it safe.
Why it had to be gold
Gold is the last material anyone associates with a skateboard, and that is the whole point of putting the two together. The generation skating now watched it travel from the parking lot to a medal table without ever handing it over. It stopped needing permission somewhere along the way. Dressing it up now reads like a lap of honor.
The Festina Rive Space Ollie puts that scene on a 40 mm Swiss made quartz in gold tone, with a fluted bezel running around the artwork, crystal-set dot markers and the date at six o’clock. Underneath there is sapphire glass, water resistance to 100 meters and a matching gold bracelet.
The Festina Rive Space Ollie is available now at iflwatches.com, priced at $790 USD. Limited to 100 pieces worldwide.
Technical Specifications
- Case: 40mm gold-tone stainless steel
- Case height: 9mm
- Lug-to-lug: 47.50mm
- Bezel: Fluted
- Crystal: Sapphire
- Dial: Hand-painted, crystal-set dot markers, date at six o’clock
- Movement: Ronda 715 Swiss quartz
- Water resistance: 100 meters (10 ATM)
- Bracelet: Gold-tone stainless steel
