Along a similar vein to Lee Cooper and Footwork Arrows from just a few years earlier, Hugo Boss and West McLaren Mercedes had produced a small blip on the racing watch partnership radar in 1997.
By then, the German fashion house was a longtime sponsor of McLaren’s Formula 1 operations, and had just been granted its first watch license the year before. Perhaps crucially, McLaren was in the middle of a 30-year partnership with none other than TAG Heuer.
Nothing unusual so far, until I ran across a small featurette under the Fashion Watches section from issue #220 of Europa Star Europe:
Hugo Boss plans to strengthen the launch of its new men’s watch line with an original communications campaign. The global approach to its target group is something Boss is well equipped to do and is comfortable with. Apart from the imposing, stark visuals of its ad campaign it has chosen to use sponsoring as an added plus. BOSS Hugo Boss watches will lend their name to prestige sporting events (Formula 1, tennis and golf) but will also be associated with the arts, join-ing Hugo Boss’s on-going collaboration of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which houses one of the most excep-tional contemporary arts collections in the world.
The context of “lend their name to prestige sporting events” (including Formula 1) is currently lost, and provides yet another rabbit hole to explore.
On at least one other occasion, including the 11/20 issue of Revue FH in 2006, Boss watches received another mention in light of their Formula 1 involvement.