The Evolving Soul of a Watch Collector

Let’s take a detour into history, a very generalized history. From about the 18th century, women were the first to wear a clock on their wrists as fashion accessories.  Men wore pocket watches.  Then, the mechanization of war in the late 19th century left military men needing something more practical for timing than pocket watches that one had to fumble with, and the idea of strapping a watch on the wrist made utilitarian sense.  The immediacy of telling time with a glance at your wrist was ideal in combat.  From roughly after World War I, the wristwatch market began its ascension as civilian men took on what had been a woman’s fashion choice for centuries because military men had changed the preconceived notion of the wristwatch.  Nothing like the glorification of the soldier to help sell to the masses.

Fast forward to the 1980’s.  The mechanical wristwatch industry has become quite mature.  In fact, in less than a century, it has gone from birth to near death due to the scale of quartz watch production.  The mechanical wristwatch manufacturers saved themselves through astute marketing and the wide adoption of luxury branding concepts.  At the same time, there was a recognition that there was a big market for collectors of used wristwatches.  Used wristwatches would begin to overtake used pocket watches in the secondary market.  And so selling used wristwatches started to grow as big business and of course the auction houses staked out their lucrative domains.

And then we approach the last decade of the 20th century and what I call the decollage (lift-off) period of the modern mechanical watch industry.  From the watch owners perspective, something else important starts in the 1990s.  Watch owners & collectors start to create communities.  The hobby aspect takes root when online forums are born for people to share information and revel in watch geekiness.  Of course our own WPS/PPro is founded after the turn of the century.  The internet also allows for some pioneers to spread knowledge widely by sharing useful content for all of us.  I’m thinking of Chuck Maddox and then Jeff Stein among a few of the guys whose knowledge many of us have used multiple times.  (I’m aware of the war of words and rifts on many of the forums during the early years but we’ll skip over it because it’s not the point.)

And now in our decade, we’ve seen the rise of watch blogging, and to be honest, the less we speak of watch bloggers, the better for me.  I do not begrudge anyone making a living in their hobby, but most watch bloggers operate as mouthpieces for watch brands and show very little courage to protect us watch buyers.  And then we have Instagram which is a medium for the narcissist in all of us, yours truly included.  “Look at my new watch - it’s 1 of a limited edition of xxx.  Look at my vintage watch, see how sharp the lugs are, never been polished.”  Instagram has created micro-watch communities of pseudonyms and robot accounts under a big carnival tent and the most valuable information shared about watches there is easily forgettable.  In fact, our present behavior is a daily contest of looking in the mirror and hoping it kisses us back.  Who has the hottest watch?  Who has the rarest vintage watch?  Who is the fairest?  And forget trying to find the next Maddox/Stein on IG, the commitment to shared knowledge is not the ethos there and I question whether that mindset exists much anywhere now.  The most frequent posts you see on forums is about “New Incoming” or the shot of a guy’s flavor of the day.  Oh great, It’s Tuesday, more Speedmasters.  Wash, rinse & repeat.      

So over 100 years ago, the simple wristwatch was adopted for men to use as a tool in conducting war — a tool to take lives as well as to preserve one’s own.  And now in 2018, you can go on watch blogs & forums & IG and see that a watch is now about your tastes & a representation of your finest self to the world; wristwatches have become fancy fashion accessories for men as much as they’ve always been for some women.  I think the spectacular rise of vintage watches is as much a phenomenon of guys wanting to wear an old watch for its appealing retro-look as much as its nostalgic horological history.  The trick of vintage is perhaps the loud protests of capturing some bygone substance/quality to validate itself.

Mechanical wristwatch devotees like us are a niche segment of the world.  A wristwatch is something we wear and that direct physical contact with us is a strength and a weakness.  Items of tastes that we men put on our bodies have always gone through changes.  Hats were once required menswear, are now an oddity in everyday life.  Formal business suits increasingly are sidelined to a more casual attire.  Of course the pocket watch is the definition of a niche now.  Think about other men’s jewelry, how easily those trends and fads come & go because they serve a superficial purpose.  So we can say that watches are an accoutrement of fashion for us men, no matter how much some protest, and watches serve increasingly a superficial purpose for us because its functional purpose has been usurped by the smartphone.  Anything that is of fashion will be subordinate to the march of time and changes in perception.  A man once could not leave the house without a hat on, until he could.  And then his son did it too.  And then his grandson knew no other way but sans chapeau.  Wearing a hat (I don’t mean sports caps) nowadays is an affectation.  The niche shrinks smaller and smaller.  We have great fun on PPro and I enjoy friendships with many guys but we are the niche of the niche.    

I think there will be an inevitable decline but I don’t know how big.  So with my generalized historical take, and if we go back to my 3 camps of thought for mature watch owners, do you think mechanical wristwatches can sustain themselves for another 100 years when most guys like us eventually go into camp #2?  What happens when the next generation never gets the watch interest to begin with and the ranks of camp #1 dwindle further?  I have a feeling that many of us mature watch owners need to be in #3 for this watch hobby to sustain itself for many more generations.  And when it comes to camp #3, the bigger question is what can we do that makes a hell of a difference?