We’re coming to the end of 2018, and yet I feel a huge void. The watch of 2018 looks a lot like the watch of 1956, or 1965, or 1978, or 1985, or 2010. Apparently, 2018 is the last year it wants to be associated with. It’s snubbing its own era, which remains elusive, invisible, intangible. Between perfect replicas of historical models, reinterpretations of watches past and the out-and-out invention of timepieces inspired by nostalgia for every decade since the war, there isn’t a single watch that is of its time, of the now.
And yet our time is pretty damn amazing! Just take cars. They’ve never been so aggressive, so sleek, so powerful or so innovative. Look at clothes. They’re unstructured, liberated, electrified by the fusion between sportswear, streetwear and daywear. Observe trainers: they’re exuberant, colourful, huge and athletic, sometimes re-issued, but more radical than ever. Consider jewellery: constantly reimagined, this year it’s geometrical, colourful and poetical. Our food culture is more vibrant than ever, bursting with creativity, eclectic influences and appetites. So, what is there to say about watches? Nothing much, nothing in particular, nothing really new.
Don’t get me wrong: I love cracked brown leather straps with overstitching near the lugs. I love Perlon: it’s cheap, washable and it’s available in any colour I want. I have nothing at all against 38 mm watches with NATO straps, tritium-style Superluminova markers and orange hands. Quite the opposite. (Although I will admit to having some reservations about the fourth vintage wave that is currently lionising the 1980s, not our most glorious decade...) I do recognise the value in an attractive, successful, well-balanced aesthetic that is anchored in traditional codes or legitimate history. And there have been at least 20 new watches this year that have left me drooling, and my bank manager reaching for his Alka-Seltzer.
It drives me crazy, but I can only assume that the watch is having a crisis of self-esteem. The short-lived but painful crisis of 2015-2018 left watchmakers profoundly unsettled once again. This brief downturn, with its two years of declining watch exports, was perhaps even more damaging than previous ones. It didn’t afflict the luxury sector in general, or a particular geographical region. It was watches that suffered, nothing else. And tellingly, not the related sector of high jewellery, in which many watch brands are equally active. So, as these watch companies drifted, spurned by their clients and facing genuine financial difficulties, some began to question their relevance, and the relevance of the entire watch industry. And, as they have always done whenever they found themselves in trouble, watchmakers turned to the past in order to prepare for the future. They eschewed modernity in favour of security. In the throes of their identity crisis, they took themselves off to their snow-covered rocky outcrops in the Jura to lick their wounds.
And it was all entirely understandable. After all, we’re continually going on about how young people these days don’t wear watches. How they live in their smartphones, which tell the time, and do their shopping and their thinking for them. How smartwatches have made mechanical watches obsolete, meaningless, and far too uncool for millennials. How complications are pointless and, in any case, no one was ever really interested in them in the first place. How traditional customers are a sorry bunch of dotards on their last legs, and we have to start going after the 18-to-25-year-olds pronto, because they’re blowing their allowances on everything but watches. In short, people are spouting all sorts of ridiculous nonsense.
But you see, what I’m actually after is something modern. Not futuristic, not science-fictiony (even though I do have a soft spot for this fun and transgressive genre where watches are concerned). No, I want a watch that is a distillation of our era. Not a watch that was worn by a film star from the last century. Not a fictionalised vision of the past, or of the future. Now. Today. And I can’t find it.
Who’s going to capture the zeitgeist? Who will encapsulate the style of 2018 in a watch that represents its era, and which isn’t a version 2.0, a re-issue, a re-design or a reboot? Which isn’t an update of a watch that used to be modern? Because that’s not the same thing as a watch that expresses contemporaneity. Who, like the author of a great novel, will impose a clear structure on this vast, complex and confused landscape? Who will write the story of the true now for the watch world? Who will make the watch that, in thirty years’ time, people will say, “Now, that is so 2018!”
