Insights E32 - A Tentative Critique of the Post-Pandemic Watch Culture

Farewell, and thank you all for listening.  The Aesthetic Revolution Will Be Beautiful!

Allen and Rikki lament and celebrate the current world of watches in equal measure, covering the rise of fashion and red-carpet nonsense to the role of modern materials in high horlogy. 

Allen could no longer resist the forces of gravity at the center of the horological universe, and now he is broadcasting from the within the Rolex Black Hole. He has sold off swaths of his collection and aquired two five-digit Rollies. An unexpected turn in Allen's journey, and perhaps one from which he can never return. Has he sold out or bought in?

Is SWATCH's BIOCERAMIC anything more than a petroleum-based plastic? Find out in this episode as Allen shares his investigation into this divisive material, its history, its current context, its chemical makeup, and even an email about it from a SWATCH representative.

A watch movement made to exacting standards by a robot on Mars working for a third-party alien corporation might turn out beautiful, precise, complicated and fascinating. Barring production on a more distant planet, no movement could be further from "in-house." This hypothetical Martian movement would absolutely trounce, say, a cheap Seiko movement made "in-house" by actual Japanese robots. I'd take the third-party Martian movement any day, and I bet you would too.

Has Rolex evolved into a brand that's For Exhibition Only" And what if Rolex no longer made physical watches? Could this be the future of global luxury brands in the centuries to come?

Allen went to the UK for the launch of Bremont's first serially produced watches with their in-house movement, but what Allen got was a ride in an old plane that showed him the unique authenticity at the center of the brand set on reviving British industrial watchmaking.

Walt has some very classy timepieces, all of a type: smaller, understated, and often highly complicated. Allen and Walt talk through five of Walt's most favorite watches, plus a sixth that came to Walt as a very pleasant surprise.

In this essay-style episode, Allen drags the historical lens across the watch space from 1990-2020, showing how what was once a lonely nerd's hobby grew into a fashionable social activity.

In this insight essay, Allen admits to feeling a little disillusioned with the broader watch culture and tried to identify why it feels different to him since COVID pandemic lockdowns and the rapid expansion of interest in watches. Special interest is paid to the role of social media in hollowing out how we enthusiasts and collectors interact around watches.