Horological Meandering

Most parties involved in and around the watch industry are concerned about authenticity and provenance. This is becoming more important as time passes for a number of reasons.

For auction houses, money laundering is a real issue. The subject of laundering in the art world has already attracted legislative and regulatory attention in a number of jurisdictions; watches are a small part of this but as the sums of money involved increases, it is only a matter of time before regulatory pressure increases. I would like to think that auction houses are improving their KYC and AML.

For most collectors and merchants, authenticity and provenance matter too. The quality of super fakes is improving. Just as digital televisions can now produce images of higher resolution than the human eye can detect, eventually fake watches will become so good in quality that most of us won't be able to tell the difference, even under the loupe. Why wait ten years for a certain Patek Philippe or Rolex steel watch when you can obtain an exact material iteration - down to the serial number and case number - for a fraction of the cost and time? Don't underestimate the power of Instagram's filtered reality to bend and reshape human expectations and behaviours. Market demand for ultra-high quality fake watches is already taking shape because of the way large numbers of people interact with watches on social media.

Until and unless there are global standards recognised and applied by industry and user alike, we have what we have today. That is, professional organisations and amateur collectors doing their own due diligence.

How good is this diligence? You've highlighted a number of examples. I regularly find auction house, merchant and buyer knowledge of particular watches to be less than excellent. It takes a lot of investment to get facts right so in many cases parties tend to trade on received wisdom rather than on known facts. This is okay so long as the reader is informed that the content presented is an approximation. This is not always the case.

I would not criticise individual buyers, and certainly not Palestinian ones. The entire ecosystem is rickety and ripe for exploitation. The recent sorry episode with that olive green PP is a case in point. Who is at fault? Patek Philippe definitely. It couldn't resist doing its own "one more watch" thing. The retailer who went out of business and didn't care. The seller whose name was comically revealed. Antiquorum for being a passive, greedy middleman. And the idiot buyer who spent 10x retail for the watch.

While this is not an example of fraud, it is an example of base, animal behaviour. These behaviours overwhelm sobriety and drive the market. When the market doesn't have good safeguards throughout the process from production to ownership, then unrestrained, unethical and illegal behaviour will creep in to one or more steps along the way.