Age Of Innocence: The Disappearing Charm Of The Good Cheap Watch

"You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." – Joni Mitchell

There are two watches I own which, for me, define one of the most important features of watch collecting, and of being a watch enthusiast. One of them is a Tudor Black Bay from 2015 and the other is a Seiko 5. Both of them have the virtues which the Joker, in The Black Knight, ascribed to a couple of other things: 

"See, I'm a man of simple tastes. I like gunpowder ... and dynamite ... and gasoline! Do you know what all of these things have in common? They're cheap."

Cheap they may be, but they get the job done and when it comes to watches, there is a surprising amount of interest to be found in being a watch lover on the cheap.

There are of course any number of people who start out with plenty of money, and who, right away, want to find out what watches are considered cool and which will be part of a larger project of building prestige on social media. This sounds like a cynical and even judgemental statement but it is not; we all get into watches, watchmaking and watch collecting for different reasons, and there is nothing inherently more virtuous about having an entry level job but finding your way in through Seiko 5 watches (or Casio G-Shocks, or what have you) than there is about have an annual watch budget of fifty thousand dollars or more, and starting out with high-end vintage, or with trying to get on the list for blue-chip watches from Audemars, Lange, Patek or Rolex (the Big-ish Four).

Still, though, there is something to be said for being forced to start small, because the new watch enthusiast on a budget is forced to concentrate on details, and on aspects of value added, which are not necessarily going to force themselves on someone who is starting out knowing they are secure for life financially, and who have enough to spend on watches that it’s more or less a question of choosing from among the usual suspects.

One of my favorite writers, A. J. Liebling, was a writer for the New Yorker for most of his professional career, and during that time he covered a lot of deadly serious subjects, including World War II (he rode a landing craft in towards the Omaha beachhead on June 6th, the first day of Operation Overlord) and some less serious but still of international interest, including boxing (The Sweet Science should be a must-read for anyone interested in old-fashioned, craftsmanlike, excellence in writing, not just boxing enthusiasts, although the latter will be apt to get the most out of a book on boxing, natch).

He also wrote, widely and enthusiastically, about food and his reflections on eating in Paris before the war, and then finding it something of a shadow of its former self afterwards. You would expect that, from years of rationing and occupation, but mourning for what's gone is separate from knowing there is a reason it happened. Anyway, on the subject of an eater's education, he wrote:

"A man who is rich in his adolescence is almost doomed to be a dilettante at the table. This is not because all millionaires are stupid, but because they are not impelled to experiment. In learning to eat, as in psychoanalysis, the customer, in order to profit, must be sensible of the cost." (Between Meals: An Appetite For Paris).

The situation for watch enthusiasts has to do with deciding, on a fixed collector's budge, what will give you the most satisfaction for a certain number of dollars. You fall in love with watches and you very quickly, if you are anything like the average watch enthusiast, find out that you are not a client for Patek, Vacheron, Lange, Rolex or Audemars Piguet.

Instead, if you are lucky, you can to choose between brands like Grand Seiko, Tudor, and Omega and if you go down the price scale a bit, companies like Longines or Hamilton or even Mido are within reach but then again, you also are starting to get into some interesting German brands, including Sinn and NOMOS Glashütte (and others.) And of course, the 800 pound gorilla of value for the money is Seiko, with its bewildering variety of models, model families, and sub-brands – including Presage (and if anyone can tell me if it should be pronounced pre-SAHZH or PRESS-ahzh, I will die a happy man, or at least, less unhappy.

Being forced to work within a budget, in other words, means you have to pay attention to details that you might not consider if you had five (or six) figures to work with and were looking for one of the top six or seven hardest-to-find, and therefore most prestigious, luxury watches. You don’t necessarily notice that both the Nautilus and the Royal Oak have baignoire (bathtub) hands because they’re both more or less the same watch, in terms of perceived prestige at least, and the details of the watch matter less than the difficulty and probability of acquisition.

On the other hand, if you are choosing among Seiko dive watches or even dive watches under five hundred dollars, the differentiating details suddenly become the only things that matter. Because acquisition is easy, taste becomes the paramount consideration. A few years of exercising taste in the field of sub-500-dollar watches and you find, surprisingly, that you can tell a good piece of work from a bad whether the name on the dial is Daniel Wellington or Patek Philippe.

The premiumization of watch prices across the board, means that the exercise of taste is harder and harder to nurture because how easy or hard it is to get something, and how much it costs, is what matters, both to the enthusiast and from a social signaling standpoint. The cheap but good watch is a critical experience in building discriminating taste, which takes time and requires looking at factors other than conferred prestige (the worst manifestation of which is the current “got the call” trope, which is I believe what the kids used to call a humblebrag). Ironically, it’s among the wide (but decreasing) pool of cheap but good watches that much of the real exercise of taste exists nowadays and without it, the whole ecosystem of watch connoisseurship collapses, like an ocean full of whales, suddenly devoid of krill.