Celebrity Watches

It seems I'm a little bit behind the times. A few years ago, when I stopped watching videos about celebrities' watch collections, "celebrity" meant "a person with too much money who has only heard of one watch brand." I got tired of seeing another Rolex, and another Rolex, and another Rolex, and so I started watching other things. 

 

But the situation has completely changed! Today, "celebrity" means "person with too much money who may have heard of as many as five different watch brands"! Today, although the next watch will probably still be a Rolex, there's a chance that it may be a Patek Philippe, a Richard Mille, a Cartier or an Audemars Piguet.

I don't know whether these brands are giving watches to celebrities, offering deep discounts, or whether the chumps are actually paying regular-people prices -- and I also don't care!

Now, there are blogs and YouTube channels and books which are each only about one brand of watch, and that's okay, if the author or creator knows a lot about that brand.

And to me, knowing which movie and music stars wear which of those five brands, does not constitute knowing a lot about those brands. I know that some people disagree. 

For example, some prominent men's magazines have full-time, high-paid staffers whom they call "watch experts," who don't know anything about watches except which movie stars or music stars wear Rolex, Patek, Richard Mille, Cartier or Audemars Piguet. 

At least -- they never SAY, or write, anything else about watches. Not even to mention Vacheron Constantine, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Breguet, Zenith, Omega, Grand Seiko, G-Shock, Hublot, A Lange & Soehne, Nomos, Glashuette Original, IWC, Piaget, Longines, Bell & Ross, Panerai, Parmigiani Fleurier, Vostok, Breitling, Citizen, Orient, TAG Heuer, Tudor or any one of the many, many other watch brands which are worth mentioning for some reason or other besides being worn by movie stars and music stars. 

You know what? When I want to know something about movies or music, I don't confine myself to asking watch aficionados about them. Call me crazy.

Open Letter to the Urban Gentry

You recently gave some advice about dress watches on your You Tube channel and I'm confused: a Richard Mille is wrong because "it draws attention to itself," but the most intense 5,000,000,000-watt design by Swatch is very, very right because it "catches the eye and can be a great conversation starter"? Is it a matter of price: eye-catching and inexpensive is fine, but if it's expensive, please tone it down? I realize too that Richard Milles are sometimes also quite large, but I feel as if there's more going on here than size. Full disclosure: I haven't yet seen a Richard Mille irl, maybe if I did I'd instantly understand what upsets so many of you about them. (Ditto for Hublot.) 

   

 

 

More full disclosure: I'm 6'3" and have big wrists, situated between big arms and big hands, and maybe I'm just a tiny bit defensive about remarks about big watches. Okay -- there's no maybe about it, and it's more than just a tiny bit. For some people, clearly, in some situations 40mm is starting to risk being a bit too big, but just remember: for other people, in some situations 40mm can sometimes be a bit small.  

I myself am quite daring in my fashion choices: for example, I like to compliment a tux not only with a huge shiny Seiko diver, but also with a scuba mask, oxygen tank and flippers. If the host's or hostesses' feelings are hurt by the thought that I might leap into the ocean at any moment and swim away 10 meters below the surface, well then, maybe he or she shouldn't have invited me to begin with! Not everyone fits at every kind of party, I quite agree.

Extreme Watches

The adjective "extreme" makes me smile. It reminds me of the idiots in Harold and Kumar go to White Castle who seemed to have only two adjectives in their working vocabulary: "so extreme" and "so not extreme." When they inflicted some torment on the undeserving Harold and Kumar they would laugh and say, "That was so extreme!" And when Harold and Kumar got a little well-justified revenge, they indignantly exclaimed,"This is so not extreme!"

Still, I don't know how describe these watches, as a group, other than to call them extreme.

I've already blogged about 2 of these watches, the Hublot MP-05, which runs for 50 days on one wind-up and is made to resemble a Ferrari engine,

and the Urwerk Atomic Master Clock or AMC,

which I'm sure is a very nice watch to begin with, accurate, I would guess, to well within a second or two per 24 hours, but which comes with a suitcase-sized atomic clock which sets it to a far, far greater degree of accuracy.

Some hand-wind Swiss watches with a power reserve of a mere 2 or 3 days require some muscle power and determination to wind them. I had wondered just how difficult it was to wind up the 50-day Hublot -- hand-wind only, no automatic winding -- until I found out recently that "hand wind' is not an entirely accurate term to describe this watch, because it comes with an electric implement which resembles a small power drill. The part corresponding to the drill bit fits into a whole like the one which a 19th-century watch had, into which a key was fitted which one turned to wind the watch. In the case of the 50-day Hublot, one pulls the trigger on the drill-like machine, and it winds the watch. I wonder whether Hublot also offers a manual option for macho nut cases with things to prove, who are determined to wind it the hard way. And I wonder just exactly how hard that hard way would be and how well I would do it, because clearly, I have issues.

Is it just me, or does the suitcase atomic clock for the Urwerk AMC look exactly like a suitcase nuclear bomb in every movie which has one? Did Urwerk do that on purpose, the sly devils? Speaking of needing to prove things, do jet-setting Urwerk customers actually carry the suitcase atomic clock everywhere they go,  getting wrestled to the ground and interrogated in airports and downtowns all over the world until the police and security figure out that that it's an atomic CLOCK and not an atomic BOMB? 

And when the cops and security personnel figure out what the suitcase-sized thing is, do they laugh and high-five the extreme-watch owner, or are they quite annoyed? Or is it a mix of both?

After the last Formula 1 season, Hublot was replaced as Ferrari's official watch partner by Richard Mille. Check out one of Richard's watches:

If you said: Wowzer. Me likey! I'm surprised that Ferrari likes something so extreme -- that's exactly what I said. Word for word.

But wait! There's more! There's something out there which is too out there for me! I admire what this guy is doing, but frankly, I don't want it on my wrist because it would give me motion sickness. Behold, Crazy Hours by Franck Muller:

See where the 1 is on the dial? See how you have to skip the 6, 11, 4 and 9 to get from the 1 to the 2? And then how you have to skip the 7, 12, 5, 10 to get from the 2 to the 3? You getting dizzy and nauseous yet? The minute and second hands go around and around on this watch just like on a normal watch, but the hour hand skips. That's too much for me, I'm out!

There are a lot of watch snobs who hate Hublot, and who hate Richard Mille even more. But they don't hate Urwerk, maybe because of who the ancestors of the creators of Urwerk were. I don't know how they feel about Franck Muller.

I also don't know how I would like any of these brands if I saw them close up, picked them up and felt them in my hands and put them on my wrist. So far I've only seen photos and video, and by now I know that photos and video just aren't the same as being there. 

A lot of you may have seen video of Urwerk without realizing it: Tony Stark, Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man, wore an Urwerk in Spiderman: Homecoming. Not the AMC shown above. The UR-110.