What Is With… overnight queues for the AP x Swatch launch and the internet’s obsession with hype?

SINGAPORE – Decorative pocket watches are probably not supposed to trigger overnight queues and enough frenzy to force a store closure over safety concerns.

Yet, that was exactly what unfolded across Singapore on May 15 and 16, when crowds formed outside Ion Orchard and Marina Bay Sands some 16 hours before the Audemars Piguet (AP) x Swatch watches even went on sale.

For this reporter, the scale of it felt both startling and unexpectedly intense in person, seeing security guards disperse people gathered outside Ion Orchard’s premises – only for them to quietly regroup nearby and continue waiting anyway.

Singapore-based luxury watch and jewellery content creator Desmond.kb, who has more than 17,000 followers on TikTok, posted about hiring nine personal shoppers to queue on his behalf – who all left empty-handed after the VivoCity outlet did not open because of crowd-control and safety concerns.

Online job advertisements offering up to $180 for overnight queuers also circulated – reassuring applicants that “no standing is needed” so long as they maintained their queue position through the night, and purchased a watch once it was their turn.

And the watches were not even limited edition.

The AP x Swatch frenzy may have centred on a watch collaboration, but it belonged to a larger internet ecosystem increasingly transforming random objects – such as Labubu plushies, Pop Mart blind boxes and Stanley tumblers – into the latest hype almost overnight.

These products differ wildly in price, purpose and audience, yet all seem to follow the same modern logic: Once enough people are seen wanting something online, everyone else suddenly starts wanting it too.

Experience is part of the product

The hottest products seem detached from practical purpose altogether.

Stanley tumblers are, at the end of the day, cups. Labubus are plush toys with terrifying grins, and the AP x Swatch pocket watch is not even especially practical compared with an ordinary wristwatch.

Yet, the less essential these products become, the more culturally loaded they seem to feel online.

Labubus – the mischievous plush creatures created by Hong Kong-born artist Kasing Lung – became so sought after globally that, at one point, rare editions reportedly resold for thousands of dollars. The launches of Chinese toymaker Pop Mart – who is behind the plush toy – in cities such as Shanghai and Bangkok regularly draw overnight queues from consumers hoping to score rare figurines.

Stanley tumblers, once associated mostly with camping trips and middle-aged outdoorsmen, exploded into internet trophies after limited-edition colour drops from the American brand triggered fights and stampedes at Target outlets across the United States in 2023.

In November 2025, TikTok users in the US posted videos about waking up at 4am to queue for Starbucks’ Bearista cold cups. When the launch reached Singapore in December, it sold out so quickly that Starbucks implemented a virtual waiting room system for pre-orders.

Associate Professor Chen Lou from Nanyang Technological University’s (NTU) Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information said consumers increasingly purchase “meanings, identities and experiences” rather than products for purely “utilitarian reasons” – while social media has transformed consumption into something deeply social and visible.

Queues themselves have become part of the hype. The longer people are willing to wait, the more desirable the product begins to feel – and the more chaotic the launch, the more culturally significant it appears online.

Prof Lou noted that queues act as a signal of desirability because consumers infer that if enough people are investing time, money and emotional energy into a product, it must carry value beyond the object itself.

The AP x Swatch launch also showed how products no longer need to be officially limited edition to feel difficult to obtain – purchase restrictions and uncertainty around stock levels created the sense that securing a watch required speed and luck.

NTU Associate Professor Charlene Chen, who has researches motivation and consumer behaviour, said the AP x Swatch collaboration became especially potent because it fused two different forms of aspiration: AP’s exclusivity and craftsmanship, with Swatch’s playful accessibility.

Consumers were not simply buying a watch, she said, but rather “the cultural meaning, symbolism and excitement surrounding the collaboration”.

Queueing can also be strangely comforting for some – 18-year-old student Yusof Ismail told The Straits Times that he made friends while camping overnight outside Ion, saying the queue itself was enjoyable, and that he “wouldn’t mind” doing something similar again because of the atmosphere.

All for the performance

More than a century ago, American sociologist Thorstein Veblen argued in The Theory Of The Leisure Class (1899) that luxury consumption often functions as public display, a concept he famously termed “conspicuous consumption”.

Internet hype culture feels like a mutated modern version of Veblen’s theory, except people today are showing off anything they managed to obtain that everyone online is obsessed with.

Owning the product matters, but so does proving and documenting it on social media.

Mr Aniq Adel, 18, who also queued overnight outside Ion, described the watches as “subtle luxury” – something “valuable” that he could “display and show”.

Singaporean DJ and social media influencer Jade Rasif perhaps summed this up most sharply when she observed that “social media turned consumption into identity performance”.

Ms Rasif herself owns an actual Audemars Piguet Royal Oak watch, yet after buying the AP x Swatch pocket watch, she posted a TikTok “saying goodbye” to the Labubu charm on her bag by swopping it out for the watch instead.

The video felt oddly fitting to describe hype culture online, where one internet obsession quickly replaces another.

Ms Rasif said attaching Labubus or Swatches onto luxury bags “breaks the reverence around luxury”, reminding people these products are ultimately meant to be enjoyed rather than worshipped.

Consumers today do not merely want expensive things, but want culturally legible things that other online people will instantly understand.

A Labubu clipped onto a Birkin does not cheapen the bag. If anything, it signals a kind of internet literacy – a proof its owner understands contemporary taste culture well enough.

As Ms Rasif put it, status today is less about raw wealth than “taste, references and cultural fluency”.

The buzz around hype culture

Social media is probably the biggest reason.

Prof Lou said algorithms, influencers, resale markets and online communities help elevate products into seeming “cultural necessities”, while constant online visibility makes certain items feel impossible to ignore.

People see the same products repeatedly on TikTok, Instagram, Telegram and resale platforms, until wanting them starts to feel almost inevitable.

The internet also speeds trends up dramatically. What once took months or years to become popular can now take off within days.

“Social media platforms are a huge driver because they reward visibility, virality and constant novelty,” said Prof Lou.

So, is hype culture actually worth it? That depends entirely on what people believe they are getting out of it.

Several queuers openly admitted to ST that they were hoping to resell the watches for profit, though some genuinely wanted them for personal use – with many saying the appeal lay as much in experiencing the overnight frenzy as in owning the watch itself.

Mr Yusof described how trends eventually “tank” once the hype dies down, noting that people buy into launches expecting resale prices to soar – only for the value to collapse once online attention shifts elsewhere.

Still, the irrationality itself seems to have become part of the appeal. After all, nobody really needs a Labubu, a Stanley tumbler in six colours or a decorative pocket watch.

Prof Chen said: “Hype culture becomes unhealthy when people purchase products beyond their financial means, or when they begin treating hype itself as proof of value.”

Ultimately, whether something is truly worth the hype depends on whether “the personal value consumers derive from it justifies the price they paid”, she added.