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The Apple Watch Hermès, with one of the three strap choices.Credit Courtesy of Apple

On Wednesday, Apple once again managed to overshadow the start of fashion month by announcing at an event in San Francisco that it was teaming up with Hermès on a new version of the Apple Watch.

The creators of two of the most iconic accessories of our time, the Birkin bag and the iPhone, working together? Zowie!

“I see it as the establishment of an alliance in excellence; like horse and carriage, a perfect team,” Pierre-Alexis Dumas, artistic director of Hermès, said in a statement.

But, though I understand the collaboration is a strategic move for both companies — easing an even bigger push into the luxury and fashion market by Apple; Hermès, which has a tendency to the staid, gets a frisson of cutting-edge cool — I’m not entirely convinced by the result.

At least not as it looked on screen, behind Tim Cook’s head. There will be a joint event in Paris on Oct. 4 to unveil the watch to the fashion flock, so perhaps I’ll change my mind. Never say never, and all that. Especially because it should, in theory, be my dream come true. And I mean that in an entirely personal way.

After all, I wear a double-strap Hermès Cape Cod watch and have for a long time (it was a gift from my younger brother). This past spring, I abandoned it briefly in favor of an Apple Watch, but we never really bonded, for a variety of reasons I later detailed in a column that provoked a surprising amount of reaction. So much so that I was asked to appear on CNBC to talk about it. By that time, I had reverted to my Hermès watch.

“So you’re telling me,” one of the TV hosts said during our conversation, “that if Apple could make a watch that looked like that” — she pointed at my Hermès watch — “you’d wear it?”

“Probably,” I said.

Dump that in the cliché bucket called “be careful what you wish for.” Because now Apple has.

Kind of. And that’s the problem.

The Apple Watch Hermès is effectively a hybrid. It has the same Apple Watch body that was unveiled in September — in the same sizes (38 millimeters and 42 millimeters); and with the same weight, albeit with improved functionalities. But it adds digital versions of some signature Hermès watch faces — the Clipper, Cape Cod and Espace — though they go to sleep, like all Apple Watch faces, when your arm isn’t moving, to save battery. There is also a trio of signature leather Hermès straps in different colors: the Single Tour (a thin strap), the Double Tour (a strap that wraps twice around your wrist) and the Cuff (a wide leather bracelet) style.

That sounds — and looks, on screen — good, but it doesn’t actually solve any of the problems I originally had with the Apple Watch, most of which had to do with its weight and dimensions vis-à-vis both my wrist and my ability to use the screen, as well as the fact I didn’t find it technically additive to my life (but that’s just me).

This could change, I know. My colleague Farhad Manjoo posited as much to me in June. Theoretically, I suppose, you could get the Apple Watch Hermès strap now, and just keep swapping out the watch bodies as they improve or shrink.

And the Apple Watch Hermès is less expensive than the traditional Hermès Cape Cod, for example. The latter retails for $2,900; the new Double Tour with 38-millimeter case is priced at $1,250. It fills the accessible luxury niche between the $549 Apple Watch and the gold Apple Watch Edition at $12,000. “Accessible” being a relative word here.

But the most interesting thing about all this is less the product itself than the fact this is the first time Apple has admitted that fashion does fashion better than Apple can.

Which is actually a pretty big shift, given that its traditional attitude has been that Apple does everything better than anyone else.

I still think there’s a ways to go: It seems to me, to really make something new, you have to actually make it new. That means Apple and Hermès would have had to start from scratch (or scratch-ish) to make a collaborative watch, as opposed to simply cutting-and-pasting each of their products into one. And that’s a truly provocative, and disruptive, idea.

Yet this collaboration sends some interesting signals about the future of wearables, and the way fashion and tech are going to have to work together. So while, at this stage, I don’t want to wear an Apple Watch Hermès, I definitely want to see what’s going to happen next.