TIME OF YOUR LIFE
Collectors don’t flinch at prices
Time has never been more ubiquitous and in your face. It’s on the phone, the computer, the car and every blasted appliance.
“You don’t need a watch to tell the time,” confesses timepiece connoisseur Watch Anish (his Instagram name) at an exhibition cocktail party celebrating luxury watches.
You hear this observation plenty in the haute horology world, even from people selling six-figure timepieces.
But facts matter not a second hand to obsessive collectors, almost all of whom are male, in a market where US$15,000 models are deemed “middle-class” timepieces.
Luxury watches are Porsches for your wrist, Birkin bags for boys that speak stacks of cash about the owners. To aficionados, that thing you’re wearing, especially if it’s a quartz movement, isn’t remotely interesting. It’s barely a watch.
While attending a watch event — like landing in a tiny, exotic and costly country, where you never really master the language or the customs — there are many tall men of impeccable grooming named Roland and Lothar, with seductive accents. The saleswomen are exceptionally knowledgeable — and, of course, attractive.
Their brands sound like 19thcentury nobility and are treated accordingly: Vacheron Constantin, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, Jaeger-LeCoultre. Their ads feature Formula One racers and tennis and international film stars who bankroll luxury magazines, which would be naked — and probably defunct — without them. Luxury watch ads seem more ubiquitous than the objects they’re selling.
Some collectors have mastered a way of getting paid for their obsession. Watch Anish (real name: Anish Bhatt) travels the capitals of the very rich reporting on luxury watches, paid by the manufacturers and tracked by 1.6 million Instagram followers.
“There’s a whole lifestyle element” to his take on luxury watches, says Anish.
He wears a custom grey windowpane suit, a diamond bouquet pin and, most important, a 1950s Rolex GMT 6542 with Bakelite bezel and Arabic numerals, blue on top, red on the bottom, that he says would sell for about US$400,000 — if anyone were selling. He figures there are about three models extant.
Need has nothing to do with luxury, which traffics in exclusivity and desire. The high-end watch world markets in history and tradition, the design and craft of venerable Swiss houses that almost went kaput during the quartz crisis of the 1970s — uttered in near horror — only to be reborn by the production of even finer, highly mechanical timepieces, some with up to 500 moving parts, that have been known to make grown men swoon.
Baselworld in Switzerland serves as the watch Olympics, but events such as WatchTime New York, hosted by WatchTime magazine (a bimonthly publication devoted exclusively to, er, watches), occur regularly wherever there is wealth and appetite.
By general consensus, we’re experiencing a watershed in the production of luxury watches.
“I don’t think there’s been any period of this much diversity and of this many fine mechanical watches,” says lawyer Jeffrey Kingston, who is also a watch authority and collector.
Some fine watchmakers produce fewer than 50 timepieces a year. Some custom watches take four years to make.
There are watch guys who are just into watches. But there are also enthusiasts who are into plenty of everything.
Kingston, for instance, loves fine cars, wine and planes. “Watches are just another fine mechanical thing,” he says. He has his limits: he’s no fan of Rolex, which many collectors consider to be a starter watch to a more complicated, exciting world.
“I respect Rolex for what they do. It’s a very good industrialized product,” Kingston says, “but they’re of absolutely no interest.”
Despite the advances in design and mechanization, these are also challenging times for fine watches, given decreased demand in China and Hong Kong; depressed oil prices and interest in oil-producing nations; a strong Swiss franc (although fine watches are produced elsewhere, including Germany, Japan and the U.K.); and smartwatches, which many enthusiasts own yet tend to dismiss.
“I wear it as a notification device,” says Kingston, who often dons an Apple watch on his right wrist, a fine timepiece on his left. But “it’s a mediocre watch with an atrocious application platform.”
Kingston is a clinician about his watches. “It’s not something to show off. I’d rather people wouldn’t notice. It’s for me,” he says. “When I go out in public, I pull my sleeve down.”
Which is so not the case with the RedBar Group. Many of these devout watch guys are double-wristing — a fine watch decorating each wrist — throwing their babies on a high-top table to share and admire.
They’re big on posing for “wrist shots,” selfies for the wrist, and are able to ID a watch by make and model from 20 paces.
“Oh, man, is that an MB & F HMX?” (Meaning, a Maximilian Büsser & Friends Horological Machine X, a five-figure novelty watch.) Why, of course it is. RedBar co-founder Adam Craniotes owns about 20 “good ones.” His wife doesn’t understand his obsession. So, four years ago, he traded in three pieces and borrowed US$10,000 from his mother to purchase a $38,600 IWC Big Pilot Perpetual Calendar Top Gun, which is the watch and story that defines him.
“This is basically a silly hobby,” he says. “If you’re not having fun, you’re doing something wrong. We spend too much money on these things that you don’t need.”