What is a Vintage Watch?

I don’t know if you’ve had this happen to you, dear WorldTempus family, but I’ve noticed that in recent years, people come up to me with questions about vintage watches once they hear that I’m involved in the watch world. They ask me if they should buy vintage watches, they ask me how to get into the world of vintage watches, they ask me if they should be investing in vintage watches.

In return, I usually ask three questions in return. Firstly, why do they want to get into vintage watches? Secondly, who do they know who has profited from vintage watch investment? Thirdly, what do they think a vintage watch is?

The first question is pretty easy to answer; most of the people who want to get into vintage watches do so because they’ve read about some exceptional story — some guy inherits an old watch or picks up a piece of junk (or so he thinks) at a flea market, which then sells for over half a million dollars. What people don’t realise is that these stories are, I repeat, exceptional. They are not the norm. And when asked who they personally know of who has consistently profited from trading in vintage watches, they often say that they’ve heard of someone who has, which I feel is not exactly a solid empirical reason to dive headfirst into an extremely expensive endeavour without any prior experience or knowledge.

The third question usually draws the most revealing answers. When asked what a vintage watch is, most people don’t actually have a robust definition. I’m not even talking about amateurs or casual enthusiasts here. I went around asking some experts in the field and the one thing all my discussions had in common is that they lasted quite some time. In other words, there wasn’t a clear-cut definition of the word “vintage” in watchmaking — at least, not one that could be laid out in under a minute. Speaking as someone who writes about watches for a living and is deeply invested in communicating with clarity and consistency, definitions matter.

First on my list of people to call was Alex Ghotbi, Head of Watches for Europe and the Middle East at Phillips. Not only does he have a fancy title at one of the most successful watch auction houses of recent years, he is a personal friend whose knowledge and understanding of watches I trust implicitly. I spoke also with Roy Davidoff, Geneva-based watch dealer who specialises in vintage Omega (or whatever “vintage Omega” means).

I caught Ghotbi just as he touched down in Geneva and what he told me, through a fog of jet-lag, is that the definition of vintage watches is shifting all the time. His rule of thumb is that anything older than 20 years can be considered vintage, before the turn of the millennium, which lends itself to a category of watches that were more artisanal in approach, produced by companies were far less corporate in structure than they are now.

Davidoff, on the other hand, cites the transition between tritium and LumiNova as a demarcating line between vintage and modern, a time which also includes the widespread adoption of CAD software in watch production. This, however, spans a period of about a decade, which is not especially precise. What’s more, according to Davidoff, what’s considered vintage in context of a Patek Philippe watch may not apply to Rolex watches or Longines watches or Omega watches.

The main issue I have with this is that if every single watch has to be assessed on a case-by-case basis in order to judge whether it is vintage or not, then the word “vintage” is effectively useless. This problem is compounded since everyone has differing definitions of what vintage means. If person A sells a watch that is vintage by one definition to person B, who understands “vintage” by another definition, then we have a problem.

What we really need is a convocation of experts to come up with a durable definition for “vintage” and for this definition to be adopted across the industry. And when I say “experts” I mean people who have spent more than a few hours looking things up on the Internet or watching tutorials on YouTube. I mean people who do this for a living, people who have academic and professional experience in this subject, who can draw from a well of knowledge that is as deep as it is wide in order to make informed decisions and conduct quality discourse. I believe it’s completely necessary for the continued growth and structure of a global watch culture.