escort diary® of Jolie: On vintage watches
I will watch your wrists at some point, and you should know that.
Let me explain what I see and hear.
A watch is one of the only pieces of adornment that men are culturally permitted to care about: rings are marital, bracelets are bland, necklaces require a level of commitment to self-presentation that most men haven't made yet.
But a watch... a watch is apparently allowed.
A watch is functional enough to justify as practical, beautiful enough to satisfy the aesthetic impulse that men are taught to suppress in every other domain, and personal enough that the choice of which watch reveals something that clothing often doesn't: your suit can be dictated by your industry, your shoes can be dictated by your commute... but your watch? Your watch is the one thing you chose with nobody else's expectations in mind. That's why I look at it: it's the freest decision on your body.
And here is where I become insufferable, because I have opinions about watches the way I have opinions about wine and chocolate and architecture, which is to say: specifically, stubbornly, and with a level of emotional investment that is probably disproportionate to the subject but which I refuse to moderate because life is too short to pretend you don't care about beautiful things.
I love a simple watch. I need to say this clearly because the watch world has developed an arms race of complications that I find baffling in the same way I find a lot of things baffling: technically impressive, visually busy, and somehow less satisfying than the thing it's trying to improve upon.
A watch that tells you the time, the date, and maybe a few elegant additions like the day or the moon phases (it reminds me of Van Gogh), in a case that fits your wrist without announcing itself from across the room: that is a watch that understands what it is, it is a watch that has confidence. The confidence of something that doesn't need to prove its value by doing more: it does one thing, it does it beautifully, it will do it across decades, it stops there. I find this impossibly attractive in objects and, if I'm being honest, in people.
The Tissot Le Locle is the watch I point to when someone asks me what I mean by elegant simplicity and doesn't want me to say something that costs more than their car. It is a beautiful watch, and for its price, an almost unreasonably beautiful watch.
The case is slim, the dial is clean (not empty, not minimal in the sterile, self-conscious way that modern minimalism often is, but clean in the way that a well-written sentence is clean), nothing is there that doesn't need to be there. The indices, the hands, the slight texture of the dial... everything is in service of legibility and proportion and the quiet, settled beauty of an object that was designed by people who understood that restraint is not the absence of ambition but the highest expression of it.
It is named after the town in Switzerland where the Tissot factory has been since 1853... which soothes the heart that needs things that last, things with a soul.
And then there is the Cartier Tank.
It is the most opinionated rectangle in the history of horology and it has been making that opinion known since 1917, when Louis Cartier designed it based on the proportions of a Renault tank he saw on the Western Front, which is the most French origin story possible for a piece of jewellery: someone looked at a machine of war and thought but what if it were elegant.
I love the Tank because it is unmistakable: you cannot confuse it with another watch, you cannot mistake it for a trend. It has looked essentially the same for over a hundred years because it was right the first time and has had the dignity to not pretend otherwise. The rectangular case, the Roman numerals, the proportions that look like they were calculated by someone who understood both mathematics and desire... it is a watch that has been finished since the day it was designed.
Everything since has been variation, not improvement.
Cartier made a version recently with a wood: Palissade de Rio, and I need to talk about it because it did something to me that I have not fully recovered from. It took the most recognisable watch silhouette in the world and gave it warmth. Not JUST the warmth of gold, but the warmth of wood, of a material that was once alive. That has grain and variation and the specific quality of things that grew somewhere before they became something else. It made the Tank, this perfect, slightly austere, architecturally precise object, feel organic. Like someone had taken a building and planted a garden on the roof, or like someone had taken a principle and given it a pulse.
I have not purchased it. I have looked at the price and made the responsible decision and I am furious about the responsible decision and I will continue to be furious about it until someone either buys it for me or I lose a fight with my own willpower, which historically does not take long.
Now... on the Rolex.
I am going to say something that will offend approximately sixty percent of the men reading this and I have made peace with the collateral damage: I don't particularly like Rolex.
I know... I know. It's the most recognised watch brand in the world, I know it holds its value, I know about the movements, the in-house manufacturing, the waiting lists, the heritage. I know all of this and I respect all of this and I still find myself unmoved in the way you find yourself unmoved by a technically excellent film that somehow never makes you feel anything. Rolex is competent, Rolex is robust, Rolex is correct and understood. Rolex doesn't move me.
Part of it is the weight: a Rolex on the wrist feels like a statement, and the statement is: I have arrived. And there is nothing wrong with arriving. But I am more interested in people who are still on their way somewhere, who are still curious, still unsettled, still reaching for something they haven't quite grasped, and those people tend not to wear watches that announce that the journey is over.
Part of it is the ubiquity: when every successful man in every industry in every city wears the same watch, the watch stops being a choice and starts being a uniform, and uniforms are the opposite of self-expression. They are the surrender of individual taste to collective expectation, and I find that, in watches, in fashion, in conversation, in everything, quietly tragic. You had the entire world of horology available to you and you chose the one that everyone else chose.
This is what your watch tells mea: not how much you spent, not your tax bracket, not your position in whatever hierarchy you navigate Monday through Friday. It tells me whether you made a choice or followed a script. Whether the thing on your wrist is there because you love it, because something about its proportions or its history or the way it sits against your skin made you feel something that you couldn't get from any other object, or whether it's there because someone, somewhere, told you it was the right thing to wear and you believed them.
The man whose watch is a love letter to his own taste, however unusual, however unfashionable, however impossible to explain to anyone who doesn't share the obsession... that's what I want. That man chose something because it meant something to him, and the choosing is the thing I find attractive: not the object, the decision. The willingness to care about something small and specific and entirely personal in a world that keeps telling you to care about what everyone else cares about.
Wear your Tissot, wear your Cartier... or buy me one at this point.
Wear your grandfather's watch that doesn't keep time anymore but sits on your wrist like a promise you made to someone who isn't here.
Wear whatever you chose with your own hands and your own eyes and your own particular, unrepeatable taste.
But don't think I will be impressed because your wrist weight 2kg of gold and has a name that makes you feel important.
(I didn't have a photo of my own watch... because I am sans montre. Which is tragic that I have yet to find one for my bird sized wrists).
