The New Status Watch? One With Personality and Soul.
With restrained details and vintage designs, the watches that offer bragging rights nowadays prioritize character and understated cool.
Photo: Elizabeth Coetzee/WSJ; Prop styling by Catherine Campbell Pearson
Traditionally, pricey “status watches” have been the purview of guys who reel off Rolex reference numbers and use the word “timepiece” without an ounce of irony. But such a narrow take on what constitutes status can make men default to snoozy, predictable tickers. It’s tempting to just fall back on one of the usual boldface-name watch brands, says vintage watch expert Mike Nouveau. “I know men who are interested in fashion, design and art but then have some garbage watch on.”
Fortunately, whether you’ve got $700 or north of $70,000 to spend, a number of buzzy, in-the-know brands have made it easy to find a statement piece that doesn’t feel by-the-numbers flashy.
Where to start if you want to invest in a watch with character? To snag a charming ticker that whispers, not shouts, it helps to look beyond the usual circular or rectangular case shapes. At the cheaper end of the spectrum is Anoma Watches, a London-based brand that specializes in triangular cases with rounded corners. These watches are “sculptural objects,” said Stephen Pulvirent, 35, a longtime watch-lover in Los Angeles. “They’re unusual in a way that invites you to look at them.”
With its asymmetrical shape and wonky hands, the Mirage by Berneron (which ranges in price from about $65,000 to $78,700) clearly takes inspiration from the “melted” look of the Cartier Crash, a crazily in-demand watch that has become, according to Pulvirent, “essentially unobtainable.” Less wild—and expensive—but still plenty playful is the Disco Volante (“flying saucer” in Italian) from Swiss brand Furlan Marri, a vintage-inspired ticker that costs about $3,100 and sports a distinctive hubcap-style case. It’s attention-grabbing without being showy.
That aligns with a growing trend in the watch market. “We’re definitely going into a subtler era,” says Mark Cho, 41, the founder of menswear brand the Armoury, which has stores in New York City and Hong Kong. Cho has seen firsthand demand for understated watches from the Japanese brand Naoya Hida & Co. skyrocket. Indeed, the clamor is so deafening that Hida now uses a lottery system to allocate the pieces, whose prices range from around $18,000 to nearly $62,000. During the most recent release, Cho says, he received roughly 1,000 applications for around 50 watches.
Louis Vuitton Tambour Convergence Watch, $33,500
Sometimes small details pack the most personality. An eye-catching light-blue ring encircles the dial of the stripped-back RP2, a new design from independent Swiss watchmaker Raúl Pagès that costs just about $108,000. Meanwhile, the Tambour Convergence from Louis Vuitton ($33,500) reimagines the dial entirely; a small sculpted window in its polished pink-gold case reveals the time. “I really love what LV is doing right now,” said Cho, of the brand’s “daring” designs.
All of Naoya Hida & Co. watches feature charming touches, like hand-engraved and -enameled numerals, but the NH TYPE3 series takes it to another level: The watchmakers hand-carve a smiling face into the gold moon on the lapis-lazuli disc of the moon phase. Benjamin Clymer, the founder of Hodinkee, a New York City-based watch media company, “ordered one on the spot” a few years ago after seeing the watch in person. The quirky details, he says, give it the feel of a vintage piece.
Naoya Hida & Co. NH Type 3B-1, $31,400 at the Armoury Photo: Elizabeth Coetzee/WSJ; Prop styling by Catherine Campbell Pearson
Another option: Literally look to the past. As Cho puts it, “If you want something with personality for not too much money, vintage is your best bet.” Nick Reed, 44, who works for a global asset manager in Denver, owns a small but impressive array of watches (including a Ulysse Nardin and a NOMOS Glashütte), but he’d love to add what he calls “a proper vintage watch that aligns with my passion for skiing.”
His “grail watch” would be a Rolex chronograph famously worn by Jean-Claude Killy, a French skier from the 1960s, he said. “There’s a sea of sameness out there, [but] vintage pieces have stood the test of time and have all sorts of quirks.”
In the hit Apple TV+ show, “Severance,” watches play a subtle role in character development. As protagonist Mark Scout (Adam Scott) enters his sterile office, he swaps an unusual ticker that has a green dial—which fans quickly clocked as a quirky old Vostok (a brand with roots in the U.S.S.R.)—for a yawn-inducingly minimalist one.
Nouveau suggests rookie vintage-hunters start by looking at models from the ’70s and ’80s, when cheaper quartz watches flooded the market and traditional watchmakers grew more experimental. You can pick up Cartier’s square-ish Ceinture (meaning “belt” in French) for around $7,000; expect to pay a bit more (upward of $20,000) for the long, arched Cartier Tank Cintrée (meaning “curved”). “There’s also a ton of interesting Patek [Philippe] shapes from the 1970s,” said Nouveau. While some can decimate savings, persistent shoppers can find, for instance, the idiosyncratic octagonal REF 3729/1 for under $15,000.
“You can get a unique watch that most people have never even seen before,” Nouveau said, “as long as you’re willing to consider brands that might not exist anymore and stuff from forgotten eras.”