NEW YORK — 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 at a midtown Manhattan cocktail party celebrating luxury watches. (Real name: Anish Bhatt, but as an Instagram brand, he’s so beyond that.)
You hear this observation plenty in the haute horology world, even from people selling six-figure timepieces.
Also, that a Timex tells pretty good time.
But facts matter not a second hand to obsessive collectors, almost all of whom are male, in a market where $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.
Attending a watch event is like landing in a tiny, exotic and costly country, where you never really master the language or the customs.
At expertly lighted booths that make the watches sparkle like diamonds (the ladies’ models are often encrusted with them), the dealers resemble charming Bond villains in dark clothes and black gloves — so as not to smudge the merchandise.
There are many tall men of impeccable grooming named Roland and Lothar, with seductive accents, with whom you might care to discuss the merits of a minute repeater or a flyback chronograph into the wee hours. The saleswomen are exceptionally knowledgeable and, it will come as no surprise, attractive.
Their brands sound like 19th-century 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 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 Watch Anish, who is the very Instagram of an English dandy. He wears a custom gray 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 $400,000 — if anyone were selling. Anish figures there are about three models extant.
Anish owns about 60 or 70 watches. Like many enthusiasts, he’s not saying the precise number — possibly because it’s in constant flux or the total is too great to fathom.
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 this showcase, WatchTime New York, hosted by WatchTime magazine, occur regularly wherever there is wealth and appetite.
WatchTime is a bimonthly publication devoted exclusively to, er, watches. “For a time, we had a spirits column, a car column, a cigar column,” says publisher Sara Orlando. “But the readers didn’t like that.”
The magazine runs a popular “Facetime” feature of readers’ photographs. It’s akin to Town & Country’s wedding announcements — except that the beloved is a watch.
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 Jeffrey Kingston, a San Francisco lawyer, 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. At the Blancpain counter, I meet a man who traded in his Bentley so he could amass more timepieces. But there are also enthusiasts who are into plenty of everything.
Kingston loves fine cars, wine, planes. “Watches are just another fine mechanical thing,” he says. He has his limits. He’s no fan of Rolex, once known as the “Texas Timex,” an industry giant that produces more than 800,000 timepieces a year. To many collectors, Rolex is a starter watch — well, not Anish’s rare vintage piece — to a more complicated, exciting world.
“I respect Rolex for what they do. It’s a very good industrialized product,” Kingston notes, “but they’re of absolutely no interest.”
