This may seem like a stupid question, but do you wear the watches you own?
I’ve met a lot of watch collectors over the years, and a number of them (not a small number either) seem to have this inexplicable desire to keep their watches as pristine as possible. They almost never wear their favourite pieces, or if they do, they wear them with such extremes of caution that would seem to cancel out any pleasure they might get out of it.
What’s the point of owning a watch that you don’t get to enjoy?
Okay, some people actually have so many watches that a lot of them just end up sitting in a safe, but that’s a whole other story. I knew a guy who would pretty much lose his mind if he found a scratch on his highly polished gold watch. This was not an infrequent occurrence, as you might imagine, and each time it happened, he would send the watch out for polishing. He frequently had a high-magnification loupe on him and would minutely examine his watches for some imperfection (real or imagined), which then needed to be fixed. You always felt like there was some kind of high-security no-entry zone around his left wrist, and that wasn’t really an enjoyable vibe.
It’s an extreme example, that’s for sure, but he’s not the only one like that, not by far. There is this pernicious fallacy about watches as investment pieces, and how you have to protect your investment by shielding it from all external hazards.
I don’t believe in that. I believe that a watch is a companion, and that its appearance should reflect that. After all, they say that you can tell a lot about a person by the company that they keep; if you’re the kind of person who wears a watch, then your watch is one of the closest and most constant companions you have. If your watch is almost interchangeable with a brand new model straight from the boutique, if it’s — metaphorically speaking — a blank slate, then what does that say about you and how you choose to live?
There’s a very particular dent on the case of my Panerai, from years ago, when I was chasing my toddler nephew around a shopping mall and he dashed into a lift and I instinctively thrust my arm between the rapidly closing doors. Even if you masked the serial number and replaced my custom strap, I would recognise my watch.
This is how I know my watches; they have lived life with me, and they look like it. How well do you know your watches? And how well do they know you?
