There is a peculiar thing that happens when two English people meet a long way from home. You clock it almost before either of you speaks: a shared humor, a reflex toward self-deprecation, an instinct to put the other person at ease.

I felt it the moment I sat down across from Orlando Bloom at a small cafe in New York’s SoHo, a few hours before he was due a few streets away at Watches of Switzerland, where Porsche Design was gathering the city’s collectors to mark a new chapter for its timepieces. Fifteen minutes on the clock, and a list of questions I had been told, very nicely, to stick to. Yet, nearly 45 minutes later, I left The Mercer feeling like I’d caught up with an old friend, not like I’d just interviewed a watch collector and movie star.

Emily Marsden and Orlando Bloom

Orlando Bloom does not care about reference numbers — as he tells you so himself more than once. “I’m not the numbers guy. I’m not giving you references. I’m talking about a feeling and a design.” In a corner of the world that obsesses over serial numbers and auction prices, it is a disarming way to hear a man account for what he owns. He buys what moves him.

He learned it young, from a grandfather who owned a pair of timepieces and had a way of moving through the world that left a big impression on the boy watching him. “It’s sentimental,” he told me. “It started because my grandfather had two watches.” One was a simple yellow gold Omega. “Omega used to be the brand, right? Before Rolex.” His grandfather was “a doctor and an adventurer,” curmudgeonly and generous in equal measure, “a big inspiration, in many ways.”

Bloom’s own collecting came a little later, as a teenager on the very British battleground of the boot fair — an institution he was kind enough to explain for anyone who has never experienced the joy of reversing a car onto a wet field at dawn to sell off the household clutter, “a bit like the Antiques Roadshow, before that was even a thing,” he says. Among it all, a 13-year-old Bloom found his first watch, a military Timex, and that was that. “Military stuff,” he says, positively lighting up. “All these cool old military-style watches.” He bought what he loved and worked outward from there.

His first proper watch came three years later, and he can still tell you exactly where he bought it. At 16, with one of the first paychecks he ever earned from acting, a 1960s Breitling Navitimer. In his 20s came a rule, one watch for every job. He still owns each one, even if they go unworn. When I asked why he still keeps them, his collector streak surfaced: “They are part of history. If you’re a collector, then it’s part of a personal history.” That word, history, is where his philosophy lives. Bloom is at an age, he says, where “you realize you don’t need as much. You need less, so you’re more specific about what you want.” What survives the edit is what carries meaning. “You know what it’s going to mean to you years from now, what it’s going to mean to my son, what it stands for… ‘the tapestry of my life.’” It is the most articulate defense of curation over accumulation I have heard from anyone, let alone a man who could, in theory, buy whatever he desires.

Joining the Porsche Design Family

And then there is Porsche Design, which for Bloom is less a brand than a gravitational field. It began, of all places, with a pair of secondhand sunglasses, original Porsche Design frames bought in a vintage shop years before any of the rest. He is frank about the shape of his life. As a young actor, he was handed cars to drive around London and the world, “a very blessed existence,” he says. When I tease him about the phrasing, he grins and lets it stand.

Orlando Bloom

But the first car he chose for himself, with the first check he felt he could spend on one, was a 1973 911 S, bought in 2006 and still in his garage. The others came and went; everything kept bending back to one marque. “I’m just obsessed with Porsche.” Ask him why, and he reaches for something more honest than you expect. “I think you feel safe when you see clean, simple design.” Cars or watches, it does not matter. “When you sit in the cockpit and everything makes sense, you feel kind of connected. I like that feeling.” The ’73 is the Sunday car, the one that lets him step out of the present tense entirely. “I feel like I’m stepping back in time. I’m connected to history, but I’m experiencing the road really viscerally.”

Then there is the man behind the gravitational field, and here the self-described “feelings collector” turns out to know exactly what he is talking about. Ferdinand Alexander Porsche, or Butzi to those who loved him, drew the 911. He also, almost as an afterthought, drew one of the most radical watches of the 20th century. The Chronograph 1 of 1972: the first all-black wristwatch the world had seen. The black was more function than form, a blacked-out dial that kills glare so a driver can read the time at speed. Bloom, wearing that very watch, lights up telling the story. “Porsche was very ahead of his time in his design of the 911,” he says, “and then he just, as a sidebar, designed this insane watch, which has stood the test of time as well as any of its competitors.”

Orlando Bloom

More than half a century later, the Chronograph 1 has reached that rare point where evolution is more important than reinvention. This year, Porsche Design has introduced the Chronograph 1 – All Titanium Numbered Edition, a permanent addition to the collection that looks beyond the original black watch of 1972 to another milestone in Ferdinand Alexander Porsche’s watchmaking story: the titanium chronographs that helped establish the material in high-end watchmaking in 1980. Limited to no more than 1,000 numbered pieces each year, it retains the instrument-like clarity of the original while quietly carrying the design into its next chapter.

Orlando Bloom

Porsche Design Chrono 1 All Titanium Numbered Edition

Bloom’s relationship with Porsche Design proper, the partnership rather than the obsession, is two years old, and it arrived in the least transactional way imaginable. He went to Stuttgart to build a car and made a whole occasion of it. Then he went back, a friend had a connection to the company, and the people there started to notice. “They were like, ‘You’re really into this. We’d love to bring you into the family a bit.’” The relationship was organic, a thing that unfolded rather than a deal that was struck, and the more time you spend with him, the more believable that becomes. “If you’re going to spend a considerable amount of your time doing something, I’d rather be doing something I’m passionate about.”

On the day of our interview, a few streets away, collectors are already gathering at Watches of Switzerland to celebrate a milestone for Porsche Design. Earlier this year, the company opened its new watch manufacture in Grenchen, Switzerland, bringing development, engineering, assembly, quality control and after-sales together under one roof for the first time. It is the brand’s first permanent home for watchmaking and a significant statement of intent, underlining its ambition to take greater ownership of every stage of the process while remaining rooted in the heart of Swiss horology. Bloom had visited not long before we met and returned talking about design, heritage, passion, focus and precision: not marketing fluff. Which is, I suspect, why they wanted him. Anyone with a public face can take a brand deal, and plenty do. Orlando could lend his to almost any house in watchmaking. What makes Porsche Design the one he chose is that he was already inside it, and that it is the rare place where the things he loves stop being separate entities and become one idea.

Ending the Form and Function Debate

A car and a watch can be made to speak to each other, the same design language carried from the 911 S/T to the chronograph you wear while you drive it, down to the strap and the dial, with the option to have something made unique to you. That connection has become even stronger with the opening of the Grenchen manufacture, where customers can now configure bespoke timepieces in much the same way they would specify a Porsche itself. From case finishes and rotors to straps and personal details, the process mirrors the experience of commissioning a sports car, bringing the worlds of automotive design and watchmaking together under one roof.

Orlando Bloom

Bloom smiles when he talks about the leather strap options on the heritage pieces and the way a strap can make or break a watch. It is a subject Porsche Design has been exploring too, recently introducing four new leather straps for the Chronograph 1 in Black, Guards Red, Classic Cognac and Dark Night Blue. Cut from the same automotive leather used in Porsche interiors and fitted with the collection’s quick-change system, they allow the personality of the watch to change in seconds while reinforcing the connection between the car and the object on your wrist.

Porsche Design Leather Strap

And, if you are Orlando Bloom, that customization can be taken one step further. “I really wanted a great leather jacket,” he says, sheepish, of the limited run that he inspired. “So we made one.” It is typical of the relationship. Whether it is a jacket, a strap or a watch, the conversation always seems to begin with something Bloom genuinely wants rather than something he has been asked to promote.

Press him on why these watches are relevant, why someone who is not a collector should care, and he goes straight to the design, not the specifications. “It’s a timeless design,” he says. “I’m wearing it today, and it was designed in the ’70s, and it’s as contemporary and comfortable as anything you’ll see out there.” He likes that the years have not noticeably touched it. There is, he reckons, “something very Swiss-German” about it — clean, clear and unbothered by fashion, form and function refusing to debate an order. It is the same reason the 911 keeps pulling him back, and the same reason a black dial from 1972 still looks like the future.

Porsche Design Chrono 1 All Titanium Numbered Edition

“There’s such a flex in the world of watches,” he says, “and I love the flex like anyone else.” But Porsche Design, he reckons, flexes differently. “You can drive a Porsche and not feel like an a–hole. Whereas if somebody sees you wearing a Porsche Design watch, they go, oh, I’m interested. In a different way.” More discreet. More curated. “I do it because I love it,” he says. “Some people are making a lot, and hats off, but that’s not it for me.” By then, it was less an interview than two people who love the same nerdy, wonderful thing, neither of us pretending to be to cool.

Porsche Design Chrono 1 All Titanium Numbered Edition

A Collector’s Learning Journey

We were well past our 15 minutes, and I told him so, conscious of the room filling up for him a few streets away. He waved it off. What he wanted to talk about, in the end, was learning. His son, and the way children take in the world. “You learn through passion,” he says. “It’s passion-based learning. If you’re passionate about something, you learn, and you learn to learn.” It is the truest thing anyone said to me about collecting, though he meant it about parenting. That is Bloom the collector, in the end. Not a man chasing references or resale, but one who learned young, from his grandfather, that a watch is never really a watch. It is a way of keeping someone. His grandfather’s two shaped him as a collector; the ones on his wrist now he is already holding for his son. Like the rest of us, he collects because he loves to curate, learn, obsess and refine.

Orlando Bloom

And that is what makes the Porsche Design chapter the exciting one. This is not a famous face rented to a logo. It is a lifelong obsessive throwing his lot in with a house at precisely the moment it has taken hold of its own future. The timing is no coincidence. As Porsche Design settles into its new watch manufacture in Grenchen, it is taking greater ownership not only of how its watches are made but of where the brand goes next. The Chronograph 1 continues to evolve through measured additions, from the new All Titanium Numbered Edition to leather straps crafted from the same hides found inside Porsche sports cars, while the philosophy that Ferdinand Alexander Porsche established more than 50 years ago remains remarkably intact.

Porsche Design Chrono 1 All Titanium Numbered Edition

The best stories are the ones where the right person meets the right thing at exactly the right moment. Orlando Bloom was already part of this story long before he became its public face. Now, as Porsche Design enters a new era of watchmaking, it feels less like an endorsement than a partnership built on the same qualities that first drew him to a vintage pair of sunglasses and a 1973 911: clarity, purpose and a design that never asks for attention, only appreciation.

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