A New Holy Trinity of Watch Brands for the Non-Billionaire Class

 At the world’s biggest watch fair, upper-middle-class dreams are destroyed.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
A new holy Trinity of watch brands for the non
billionaire class, by Gary Steinhardt. Gary steinardt is a novelist.
Random House will publish his new book Vera or Faith
on July eighth, read by Danny Scott. Almost ten years ago,
I fell victim to a terrible affliction. In desperation over
the state of the world. I waited, first gingerly, then frantically,

(00:23):
then pathologically into the vast sea of my first and
only hobby, watch collecting. Over the years, as the world
continued to disintegrate, as Trump won, morphed into covid, than
into January sixth, and finally into Trump two, the hobby
consumed me. Whenever my phone pinged with the latest disaster,
I typed in www dot hodinky dot com, the foremost

(00:47):
site for watch nerds, and was instantly summoned into a private,
strangely ordered world the kind children take for granted. Stone
dials riveted me, balance cocks made me dizzy. The art,
this social history, the engineering, all of it made me
forget the daily cataclysm around me, if only for a moment.
Watches kept me as my therapist, also a watch collector,

(01:10):
said regulated, I spend hours per day looking at watches,
talking about watches, getting trashed on old fashions with fellow
watch collectors at secret watch meet ups and horological galas.
One watch became ten, became twenty, until finally I had
amassed thirty one, a timepiece for every day of the month.
I wrote a novel called Lake's Success, which featured a

(01:33):
watch collector as the main protagonist. I even traveled to
a magical city most New Yorkers, such as myself have
only read about in books, Chicago, to lecture on watches
at an event sponsored by the Swiss consulate there. And
yet in some ways I was no more than a
horological debutante, for I had never attended the premier event
of those consumed by my passion, the annual gathering in

(01:55):
Geneva called Watches and Wonders. This needed to change. On
March thirty first of this year, I flew to Geneva.
On the left side, you can catch the view of
Mont Blanc. The pilot announced it looked like a nice
snow capped mountain, but it wasn't wearing a watch, so
I gave it a pass and looked instead at the
excellent gilt dialed Rolex GMT from the nineteen sixties on

(02:19):
my wrist. Upon arriving, I ran straight for the famed
lakeside Hotel de Berg, Geneva, you may be interested to learn,
is set around a pointlessly large lake of greenish blue,
with a frothy fountain at one end. There I met
my friend Stephen Poulvernt, formerly of Houdinki and now in
private practice as a consultant, who took me to visit

(02:39):
some of the premier independent watchmakers on the planet. In
a suite overlooking the lake, I shook hands with the
amiable and terrifically bald fin Kari Vutelinen, one of the
half dozen esteemed watchmakers in the world. Like others in
the highest echelons of watchmaking, Vutelainen makes small works of art,
one watch at a time. There are about sixty pieces

(03:01):
made per year in his workshop, and they are priced accordingly.
Part of the architecture of watch movement or engine is
called a bridge, and Vutelnens are as robust as the
Golden Gate. To day, I was getting a sneak peek
at something the watch Cognishentti have been praying for, as
if it were the second coming of abro Luis Bregue,
the Swiss French eighteenth century watchmaker responsible for many horological innovations,

(03:24):
the revival of the storied Danish brand Urban Jurgensen, founded
in the distant ear of seventeen seventy three under the
direction of Utilainen. As these watches were yet to be launched,
I was not allowed to take even a shaky iPhone
photo of them, and had to sign a set of
documents promising the brand who knows what. Nonetheless, I can
tell you that Vutelenin has outdone himself. I'm not a

(03:48):
fan of the toulbion, a Foppish mechanism within a rotating
cage designed to counter gravity, and which these days is
even more anachronistic than the mechanical watch itself, flying or otherwise.
But the nimble minded Finn has completed a wristwatch version
of the tubion based oval pocket watch, designed by horological
god Derrick Pratt, and the resulting movement is as stunning

(04:10):
as anything out there, all the depth and detail of
one of the greatest pocket watches ever made. Now strapped
to one's wrist, the price is half that of an
entry level house in New Rochelle, New York. So one
might as well buy two and find a nice non
horological bridge to sleep under. The windy Geneva day swept
me and Stephen across the lake and up a hill

(04:31):
to the attelier of perhaps the most famous young independent
watchmaker to day, the Kosovo born Reshep Rasheppe. We met
him up in the layer above one of his workshops,
which was already occupied by Ben Kleimer, the founder of
Hodink and kapud Tuti Capi of watch journalists, famed for
his thick beard and pastel sweaters, and an early champion

(04:51):
of Ruscheppe's work. Rasheppi, who makes his watches almost entirely
by hand, including the case as well as the movements,
is hum and unpretentious in a field where some of
the most ballyhooed watchmakers treat their clients like so many
heads of dairy cattle lactating Swiss francs. As a sign
of welcome, Rocheppe handed me the watch off his wrist,

(05:13):
a prototype of the chronomet contemporan that made his name,
and apologized for the poor quality of the movement work.
On this particular example, I have seen photographs of his
watches before. But in the warm afternoon light, I was
brought to the deepest and most mysterious places, somewhere between
vision and cognition, between appreciation and desire. It's not just

(05:34):
the finishing, the striping and chamfering that can be found
on many of the best watches that moved me. It's
what we writers call world building, a three dimensionality that
reflects more than mere craftsmanship. The watch journalist Jack Forrester
once wrote a pair of watches he admired, It's not
great art, but it is great design, which has dignity

(05:55):
of purpose art doesn't. Racheppe's work is one of the
few watches that maintains the dignity of great design while
capitulating itself into something like art. His watches are the
vision of someone who sees more than the turning of
gears and the glide of an hour hand, but also
the warped shade of the soul of the wearer for
which his time pieces try to correct. It is unfair

(06:17):
to contrast the more commercial fare of watches and wonders
after seeing the works of Vutulina and Rascheppe. But the
next morning I took the shuttle bus to the cavernous
by lexpo by Geneva's airport. I had capped the previous
night by attending a party thrown by Jacob and Co,
where every enormous bejeweled watch handled by seven foot tall
Russian women seemed to coax the entire storyline of the

(06:39):
movie Noorra onto the wrist. I also managed to eat
twenty six microbleanies with caviar burping yesterday's champagne. I stumbled
into the Beiji and brown halls of watches and wonders,
which reminded me of the safety and consumption promised by
the airport of a newly prosperous country. Unlike such an airport,
there were bars serving free shots of espresso and pastries.

(06:59):
Which are you turned. The sixty brands exhibiting at the
fair had booths of different sizes, ranging from the footprint
of a decent doner kebab shop to a flying spaceship
with tea interiors. Rolex's booth was a small green skyscraper
thronged at all hours. Within these habitats, the brands dispensed
touch and try sessions to visiting journalists. Some of the

(07:20):
more passionate Italian representatives referred to them as touch and feel,
allowing us to put on silky gloves and grope the
objects of our obsession. In the watch world, there's a
so called holy trinity of three very expensive brands known
for their history and commitment to design and craftsmanship, Patec Philippe,
Eau de Martpiguet and Vacheron Constantine. I believe in a

(07:42):
new holy trinity of watches for the non billionaire class,
composed of three brands Nomos Glasshutte of Germany, Grand Seiko
of Japan, and Tutor of Switzerland. The watch that made
me lose my mind for watches back in twenty sixteen
was a Champagne colored bau House adjacent almost minimatic, whose
beige strap I would tan to a crisp in the

(08:03):
summer sun, then soften with the aid of the morning
fog rolling through the fields of my upstate DATCHA. Fortunately,
the Nomos encampment was right by the entrance to the fair,
and I was quickly received by the friendly Germans. Each
watches and wonders no most does its customers want better?
This year? They buckled my knees with their new club
sport World Timer, allowing the user to track a second

(08:25):
time zone with elegance and ease. The brand is known
for its promiscuous use of color, and the World Timer
comes in eight colors, with the Earthy Canyon and the
Icy Glacier being my favorites. Six of the eight colors
are limited editions and appear to have already sold out online.
If you are looking for a first watch, stop here.
These time pieces come with a useful complication, an in

(08:47):
house movement, and are beloved by my coolest visually oriented friends, architects, artists,
museum haun shows and graphic designers. And it will cost
you less than five thousand dollars for something you will
wear for the rest of your life. Across from nomos
I spotted its opposite, the British Bremon, which tries to
monetize the aerospace theme with increasingly desperate results. They had

(09:09):
set up their booth with the snout of an old
airplane and an ejector seat that may well have proven
useful to customers who wished to parachute themselves over to
nomos I will not waste space, describing their latest outsized
offering its name alone, Altitude m be automatic, should keep
your wallets snugly in its pocket. My first meeting of
the morning was with the venerable Patek Philip. Last year,

(09:31):
the brand earned the ire of some of its collectors
by launching a watch called the Cubitis that took the
elegant shape of the famous and impossible to purchase at
retail price Nautilus and made of it a very large
puzzling square. Additionally, they released an advertisement for the Cubitis
featuring a young millennial man on a rooftop rhapsodizing about
his good fortune and humility. That was, to quote my

(09:54):
younger watch collecting friends, the height of cringe. To cap
it off, TERI Stern, the company president, responded to collector's
opprobrium with the now infamous quote, the haters are mostly
people who have never had a Pateech and never will.
As the happy owner of two pateecs, one modern one vintage,
I hope mister Stern will allow me to opine the

(10:15):
Cubitus is not the mason's best work. However, it's not
a complete catastrophe, and the smaller size presented at the
fair was, as one onlooker told me, almost acceptable. But
all is forgiven because Patek has unveiled what has been
missing from its catalog for quite some time, an absolutely
gorgeous calatrava, the elegant, dressy time only model that in

(10:37):
effect created the Pateec of today. It boasts a dial
of peaceful salmon rosegold opaline for the pedants, with indexes
of anthracite white gold that give it the look of
a vintage dial with dark patinated indexes. The whole thing
is cased in platinum and will only set you back
forty thousand Swiss francs or a million US dollars. The
way things are going, I walked out of Patek, passed

(11:00):
the cubitis shaped male influencers emoting for their cameras to
follow up on a tip from Ben Klemer. The moment
I first saw him in the lobby of the Hotel
de Berg, he took out his phone and told me,
this is the best thing I've seen so far. The
watch in question was the ah Langenzuna eighteen fifteen, time
only displays hours, minutes, seconds and nothing else in a

(11:21):
new small size of thirty four millimeters in pink gold.
At the Lang Touch and Fondle session, I found myself
mouth breathing in awe. Yes, watch sizes have been shrinking
in the past few years, to the delight of my
tiny wrist, but this was dress watch perfection. A warm
blue dial with the rose gold case brought to life
and once turned over, the smallest Lang movement ever produced,

(11:45):
essentially a thin mint glowing with the brand's typical heat
blued screws and gold chatons. I own a thirty seven
millimeter laying Saxonia thin and white gold that has gotten
me through some dreary tuxedo evenings, but at this price
range somewhere in the high twenty, the thirty four millimeter
eighteen fifteen is the dress watch to beat. At the

(12:05):
fair's canteen, I ran into my drinking buddy, the author
Matt Ranick. He wrote the best seller A Man and
His Watch who over glasses of Lefeu Lac and some
sort of paprika octopus, gave me survival tips. The Piaget
booth had the best gin martinis, the temperature was fantastic,
Laying had the best beer Radeberger alongside good pretzels, and

(12:28):
Vacheron had the best off menu Negroni and the best espresso.
Ask for Marizio. I did a lap around the fair
to confirm that Ranick was correct on all counts, and
then stumbled off to the gran Seco booth, one of
the few brand enclosures not thumping with terrifying bass, to
drink some contraband Japanese whiskey. Gram Saco is the second

(12:49):
part of My Holy Trinity, and its latest offerings have
been winning wrist space all over the world. Like nomos,
they work hard for your money and the results are
often ethereal die that allow you to dive into a
Japanese lake or get lost among bamboo and crickets. The
new Grand Seiko spring Drive, a complicated concoction of traditional
mechanical elements with non battery courts components, is the world's

(13:13):
most accurate movement with a mainspring. It gains or loses
no more than a shocking twenty seconds per year. The
young investment bank analyst who doesn't want to go the
Rolex submariner route will find an equally priced watch that
will always keep them on time while delighting them with
a dial of icy Blue at their lowest three am
Adderall moments I spoke to the dapper Achio Naito, the

(13:36):
president of Seko, who mentioned the new watch's microadjust bracelets,
which give the user the ability to compensate for more
bloated wrists during the summer and after pigging out, and
whose absence has long bedeviled Grand Seiko lovers. He told
me that many watch brands were struggling at the moment.
During COVID, watch sales boomed as the world's population stayed

(13:56):
at home, but then cratered in the past two years
after pure could spend on dinners and vacations again. Grand
Saco nitosn assured me was immune to this trend and
still growing. Did I mention that the new watches are
a perfect thirty seven millimeters in diameter. I had been
at the fair for barely a day and was already
watch drunk. I clunched a fist around the stem of

(14:19):
the Piaget Martini glass and emptied the contents with delight.
The charmingly British fashion editor of Hodinki, Melika Crawford, sneaked
me into a special showing of Cartier's novelties. I am
a minimalist at heart, but I recognized genius in every form.
All the talk at the fair was about the splendid
new Tanka Guiche, a slab of precious metal with the

(14:40):
mechanical digital display. But I found the bejeweled TreZOOr, which
Malika later compared to hollabread. That's sick. Can't breathe, she
said as she handled it, and the Ponter Bengal featuring
a leaping panther reaching for the watch proper with one
paw to not just perfectly cradle my wrist, but to
reimagine it. Isn't this why we buy watches, to transport

(15:03):
us from the terror of the here and now and
into a sparkly feline jungle of a crazy Swiss person's imagination. Next,
I wrote in a motor coach to the Rolex headquarters
in some unglorified part of town. There, amid the green
furniture green is the official color of the crown, or,
as I have been corrected, the coronet. I got a
chance to look at the well preserved desk chair and

(15:25):
typewriter of Hans Willsdorf, and to compare the visionary Rolex
founder with the tasteless dufices who run so many current companies.
The watch hobby may never recover from the fact that
Mark Zuckerberg has joined our ranks. I ran into one
of their ambassadors, a famous tennis player who showed me
the most talked about and controversial watch of the show,
the Rolex land Dweller, hanging off his wrist sometimes Watches

(15:49):
and Wonders feels like Rolex and wonders as the famous
green brand demands that attention must be paid. The new
Land Dweller may well be the most controversial watch of
this year's event. Beginning with its confusing name, a play
on the already existing Sea Dweller and the Sky Dweller,
I suppose the Land Dweller is positioning itself as the
perfect watch for billions of us who don't live in

(16:11):
the ocean or on a hot air balloon. The watch
comes with an advanced new movement which makes its case
far thinner than Rolex's current maxi cases that, to some eyes,
ruined the perfect proportions of the brand's vintage watches. The
land Dweller case and the integrated bracelet pay homage to
the now defunct Oyster courtz references of the late nineteen
sixties and nineteen seventies, and that is a very good thing.

(16:34):
Oyster Courtz was Rolex's attempt to deal with the so
called Courtz crisis, during which Japanese battery fueled watches overtook
their mechanical brethren. In the nineteen seventies, budding vintage collectors
ought to check out the Rolex fifteen thirty, which combined
the excellent oyster Courtz case with the mechanical movement the dial,
which resembles a series of honeycombs, or for the stubbornly

(16:55):
aquatic minded land dwellers among us, a constellation of fish scales.
Feels a little too busy for me, especially given the
fluted bezel, But this model is just the opening salvo,
and it is all but certain that Rolex will come
up with something more cohesive in the near future. My
favorite version of the land Dweller was housed in an
Everro's gold case with the baguette diamond set bezel. As

(17:17):
Cartier has shown, there is no room for caution if
you want to go over the top, and the combination
of diamonds and rosegold wore the spirit of the seventies
on its sleeve, were it not for its eighty eight thousand,
three hundred dollars price tag and utter unavailability, I would
get one. I walked over to Rolex's sister brand Tutor
for a gander. The workman like Tutor was one of

(17:38):
the first watches I bought when I started my collection,
and the Black Bay fifty eight was part of the
uniform of half the journalists I met during the fair.
The coolest watch I saw at the fair was an
Air Fronce branded Tutor worn on the wrist of an
actual Air France pilot. Falling in love with the Tutor
is a little like being seduced by a potato. And yet,
despite the fact that these are not the slim time

(17:59):
pieces I usually prey, the brand serves as the final
pillar of my holy trinity of contemporary watches. This year
brought the brand's usual thoughtful tinkering, with the most pleasing
example being the burgundy Black Bay fifty eight. It is
hard to describe the watch without leaning into its color.
It is the most burgundy thing on the planet. Additionally,

(18:19):
Tudor slimmed it down by a few millimeters, which makes
it almost perfect. While Geneva Proper is home to some
of the best independent watchmakers such as Russia Porsheppe and
the Spinning twirling absolutely Bonker's work of mb and f
their Mad Gallery and the Old Town is a pilgrimage
in its own right. The fair had a few of
my favorite indies on its premises as well. Parmesani Fleurie,

(18:41):
a brand I've long admired for its combination of classicism
and function, has come out with an especially elegant Perpetual Calendar,
an old complication which computes all the days of the year,
including the leapyear, by presenting all of the information day, date, month,
leap year status in two handy subdials instead of the
usual three year, leaving the eye to glaze over a

(19:02):
lovely expanse of negative space. And h Mozarece. H Mozarin
Company came out with its pop collection, combining improbable colors
such as Lapis lazolie and lemon chrysipraise into what is
essentially lazepam for the wrist. As the days of the
week long fare passed, and as Donald Trump's Liberation Day
made everyone put down their champagne glasses for a moment,

(19:25):
I remembered what Matt Rannick told me. I've developed so
many friendships here, the people at watches and wonders are
truly the best thing about the show. All the glorious
weirdos I've met through the watch world over my decade
in the hobby were here, squished into their finest attire.
Between touch and try appointments. I sidled up to them
over espressos and bell jars of Sam and Poc. Having

(19:47):
attended the fair for many years, they knew so much
more than I did, and like all of us lovely
watch nerds, they loved to talk. The industry is struggling,
and the watch CEOs are more platitudinous than ever. Victoria Gamel's,
who writes for The New York Times and elsewhere, told me.
The veteran watchwriter James Dowling reminisced about how things used
to be in the now defunct Basle World Trade Show

(20:09):
during the nineties. Brightling had topless dancers and dwarf throwing,
he said. Others like Logan Baker, formerly of Hodinki and
now of Philip's auction House, talked about how there were
simply too many watch brands out there. I don't see
how the market can support them, he said. He also
said that there were fewer members of the traditional press
this year. The biggest release. Rolex's land Dweller was first

(20:33):
unveiled by Teddy Baldassar, a YouTube centered retailer with a
store in Cleveland, Ohio, who does not even sell Rolex watches.
Others were neutral to pessimistic about the fair and the
watch industry in general, but more upbeat about specific brands.
I see it as a good thing that most brands
seem to have defined what they are about and are
offering new watches that support those identities. Gary Getz, the

(20:56):
esteemed collector and writer, told me he cited Parmezani with
their subtle textured dials in soft colors in line with
their understated elegance. I asked company representatives their thoughts about
the thirty two percent tariff Trump briefly levied against Swiss
products before implementing a ninety day pause and backing down
to ten percent. Most told me what a jeges Lecout's

(21:17):
public relations person did for now, it's business as usual.
Pramajani's CEO, Guido Tini, wondered if more Americans would travel
to Europe to buy watches. We have to find a
way to protect profitability, he said. I thought that was
all fine, but wondered if somewhere in the bowels of
the Palexpo there was a private room where grown men

(21:37):
could go to cry. And then there is the question
that watch collectors kept asking even before the tariffs arrived,
the question of COVID and post COVID watch prices rising
into the stratosphere and to a place where only the
Amazonian owner of blue Origin dares to tread. Even a
normal rich person can't afford this. Jack Forster told me,
with a shrug of the shoulders. I have omitted many

(22:00):
of the prices of the watches I have written about
because I did not want to sadden the reader. But
the truth is that the contemporary watch industry exists in
part to frustrate the dreams of the upper middle class,
of anyone who dreams beyond their station. Yet it is
the dreams themselves and their attendant frustrations that drive the

(22:20):
engine of the industry's profit. And still, despite it all,
the love of watches continues. On the final days of
Watches and Wonders, the show was open to the public,
and I was pleasantly surprised by how many kids I
saw running around the place, gawking at the wares, eating
the ten dollars hot dogs and forming an orderly Swiss
line outside the Green roll Ex skyscraper, a line that

(22:42):
seemed to extend into infinity. Just a few days ago,
before Trump destroyed my retirement account along with my nation's economy,
I had thought of buying the new Lang eighteen fifteen,
but for the time being, I was still in Geneva,
and there was always this Swatch boutique at the airport,
and it would do just fine.