Last autumn, I posted a video on my Instagram account of Cardi B flashing her iced-out Patek Philippe Nautilus. Cardi was full of her usual brash joy: “I’m gonna show off this shit ’til the day I die.” Her selfie clip represented everything I love about watch culture right now: timepieces feel cooler, sexier, and more expressive than they ever have before. It’s part of the reason I launched @dimepiece, a community for the growing collective of female watch enthusiasts.
Posting the video to my account lured a predictable band of haters to criticise the fact that Cardi’s watch was customised with aftermarket diamonds – certain purists have a knee-jerk urge to scoff at the mere sight of customised watches. It’s a fact that aftermarket anything will detract from the value and form of a watch, yes, but the issue transcends mere fact – and the comments missed the point. The response led to me writing a deeply researched piece on why people get so upset about customised watches (hint: there is a racist undercurrent to the vitriol against all things bust down).
When I posted the article on Instagram, it attracted more than 100 comments – loud agreement, grumpy disagreement. Plenty of people added accounts of their own personal experience: “I actually quit a popular watch forum over a watchspotting thread where some members very aggressively insisted that Pharrell [Williams] couldn’t possibly own a Richard Mille,” wrote one. “If he were another shade and style, there would’ve been no questions asked.”
The ideal of social media as a utopian tool for connectivity is pretty laughable in 2022. With cyberbullying, misinformation, destructively addictive algorithms, over-aestheticised brunch photos and Fortune 500 companies tweeting like 16-year-old clout chasers, it feels like we’re far beyond what could have been. And yet the notoriously stoic watch industry – with the exclusion of a few trolls – exists in a sweet spot, bound by no season and immune to fickle cultural movements. Historically confined to a privileged sliver of the population, only recently has the lust for high-end timepieces been more widely shared. For too long the narrative around watches and watch wearing has been overseen by a homogenous group of people, which can be best described as “straight”, “white”, and “male.” But social media doesn’t care about who’s in charge. Instead, it gives a platform to voices veering from this norm and bringing forth a wave of new perspectives and trends that have shaken up the industry.
“In the early days, you could not even upload a photograph of a watch,” says William Massena, founder of Massena Lab and formerly the managing director of the forum TimeZone. Back in the early noughties, watch lovers flocked to such online forums to voice opinions, flaunt collections, and dissect releases. They became a rich universe for collectors and enthusiasts to earnestly review new drops and share diamond-in-the-rough vintage pieces – using only the descriptive power of words.
“I remembered the first image that appeared on TimeZone, that wasn’t sent to us from a retailer, was from a user who uploaded a scanned image of his Royal Oak Offshore,” says Massena. “Eventually, as technology improved, so did the website, but the discussion-led approach of the forum community remained.”
Discussions were moderated to ward off trolls and bad players, creating a sense of true community. Even today, as more accessible watch publications such as Hodinkee emerge, the OGs remain a detailed source of insight and inspiration – however specialised and inside-baseball the conversations are.
Of course, visually led platforms such as Instagram now democratise what it means to adore timepieces, nudging the door open for a whole new breed of enthusiast – and flinging it open for the day ones. Or as A Collected Man, an online watch platform, puts it: “The instantly digestible image of tropical dials and chunky bezels triggered the pleasure receptors in enthusiasts’ brains far quicker than a lengthy forum post ever could.” No idea what a tropical dial is? You’re not in deep enough.
Massena acknowledges social media’s benefits in garnering a new audience and fostering more seamless conversation between watchmaker and consumer, but it’s not all dandy. “Social media platforms favour instantaneous, instinctual responses – a user can choose to click the like button or to keep scrolling past,” says Massena. “Occasionally, a user leaves a comment, and if so, it is usually short. Comments can be critical or full of adoring emojis, but they are rarely nuanced. Instagram is typically not the place for long, healthy debate.”
Rather, it can serve as a jumping off point for bigger conversations had among anyone – irrespective of age, race, sex, or knowledge – that would otherwise not formally be had on cocooned forums.
“Social media has revealed that the watch world is actually more diverse than we realised,” says Perri Dash, retail director at Watches of Switzerland and co-host of Wrist Check Pod. “Connectivity via these platforms is directly responsible for the amplification of the under-represented voices of people who were already participating.”
Women, long ignored in this dick-swinging industry, have also found support on IG. I, for one, have benefited dramatically; you would not be reading this article today if it weren’t for that. In the cursed summer of 2020, I started dimepiece.co, dedicated to women and watches, inspired by my brief work at the watches department at Sotheby’s. What I’d learned, in addition to the pronunciation of Audemars Piguet – aw-duh-maaz-pee-gay – was that women were nowhere near central to the watch story. So, I thought, let’s manipulate the narrative and post a photo of, say, Baby Spice and her gold Cartier Tank Française (the watch also worn by Lady Diana... taste!).
Instagram content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
It’s shocking to realise that this sort of watch identification was groundbreaking within the insular watch community – before this, it was unlikely that “Baby Spice” and “watch world” shared the centre of a Venn diagram. And yet celeb photos and my daily observations, delivered with a bit of personality and a disregard for the self-serious tone of many watch enthusiasts, generated an audience that eventually led to several writing jobs, relationships with most of the major watchmakers (although… Patek Philippe still hasn’t banged my line), my first trip to Geneva (watch Mecca) and a podcast.
It’s not like women weren’t in the industry before me – there are many, enthusiastically engaged from both the consumer and industry side. But frustrated by the lack of consideration and thoughtful direction for female consumers on behalf of major watchmakers, these women have taken to social media to unite and voice their opinions, resulting in tangible change. Audemars Piguet hired Ginny Wright in 2019 as CEO of the Americas, making her one of the few female executives (really, you can count them on one hand) in the watch industry. Vacheron Constantin has released its first perpetual calendar watch for women in its 250-plus year history, citing the female collector’s increasing desire for sophisticated mechanical timepieces (contemporary ladies’ watches are predominantly fitted with quartz movements). These developments are occurring because women are genuinely becoming prioritised within this rigid industry – and the soapboxes lent to us via Instagram are certainly, in part, to thank for this.
Since the ’60s, when watch advertising got the Mad Men treatment, it has stuck somewhere between hunky adventurer, charming athlete, glossy A-lister, and cultured gentleman vibes. Such archetypes have evolved over the years into high-profile brand ambassadors. Roger Federer wears Rolex, and before him, Paul Newman wore his eponymous Daytona. Cindy Crawford wears Omega, as does her daughter Kaia Gerber. The big players rely on these figures to convey the spirit of the brand and who they’d like us to think of as the wearer.
“Way before certain models became household names and were near-impossible to get hold of, it’s safe to say brands had a customer profile in mind,” says Nick Federowicz aka @adpatina, who sources and sells vintage watch adverts. “Rolex often chose men in positions of power to embody the Day-Date. Through many effective campaigns over the years, the solid yellow-gold Rolex ‘President’ became not just a status symbol, but an element of style donning the wrists of powerful and successful men.”
Such names resulted in greater recognition of watch models, but the ads today don’t always hit the spot. Sure, the likes of Gucci and Tiffany & Co. have flipped the script on the format of luxury advertising, but generally speaking, watch ads feature unattainable, isolated images of product, or black and white photos of ambassadors flaunting their best wrist pose. Adverts that were once inspiring (Rolex’s “If you were” series from the ’60s and ’70s is iconic) don’t cut through the noise like they used to. Instead, they lean on an “if you know, you know” message: if you were born into the hobby via your father who wore an X, you know just how exciting and deep X watches can be.
Thankfully, social media has democratised the way watches are positioned, inspiring creators and scrollers alike to surpass the paid messaging and, in the process, open up the watch world to a more diverse set of fans. “With the broader fanbase, and ultimately market, it’s only a matter of time before traditional advertising changes to reflect a new reality and the latest fashion,” believes Federowicz.
Even the hallowed world of auction houses – institutions as conservative and change-averse as any – have caught on to the new way of doing things. Arthur Touchot, specialist and international head of digital strategy at Phillips Watches, says IG has gone from a “nice to have to a must-have” aid in sourcing rare and important watches – and then finding buyers for those very watches.
“A significant number of new bidders discover us on social media,” says Touchot, whose employer is partly responsible for the new wave of enthusiasts at-large with its record-breaking figures, starting in 2020. Last year, Phillips achieved the highest annual sale total for any auction house in history at £180 million – a 57 per cent increase from 2020. Contributing to that astonishing figure was the £5 million sale of the first publicly available Patek Philippe Nautilus Ref 5711T made in collaboration with Tiffany & Co., marked by its signature blue dial.
Phillips dropped news of the lot on the grid. “I remember publishing that announcement at Geneva Airport, minutes before boarding my plane to New York for the auction,” recalled Touchot. “When I landed six hours later and turned my phone back on, the whole watch world was aware that we were going to auction the watch. It was quite surreal.” This sale transcended the watch world, with fashion Twitter and podcasters aflutter with chatter of the limited edition grail. Buzzy moments such as these contribute to non-endemic interest, which had already been growing since the 2017 sale of Paul Newman’s “Paul Newman” Rolex Daytona, which fetched an unprecedented £16 million at auction (also hosted by Phillips).
If watch web 1.0 was all about discussion, the new world is predominantly a source of information and inspiration for people new to the hobby, looking to expand their collection, buy their first watch, or simply window shop. Celebrity wrist spotting has become essential to this ecosystem. The account @superwatchman, for example, has built 650,000 followers by posting photos of Formula 1 drivers with their Richard Milles and includes the eye-watering prices of the timepieces in the captions to rev up the hype. Writer Nick Gould, who also identifies celebrity watches on his personal Instagram account @niccoloy, does so with more subtlety and style, selecting imagery that rises above the hype du jour, such as a film still from the ’70s of Dustin Hoffman wearing a two-tone Rolex GMT-Master.
“Steve McQueen and Paul Newman kicked off the trend of people noticing a particular watch on someone’s wrist,” says Gould. “McQueen wearing the Heuer Monaco in the racing film Le Mans gave the square-cased chronograph an extra level of cool and raised its profile.” And, sure, paid celebrity ambassadors have been eternally influential – but famous fans paying full price are moving the needle (or, dare I say, the hand) in louder ways.
Over the past few years American rapper and record producer Tyler, the Creator has amassed a killer collection of vintage Cartier timepieces – wrist candy we’re only aware of because hawk eyes dutifully covered it on social media. More often than not, Tyler’s hottest pieces were shopped from the “ladies” category – kick-starting a trend towards genderless watches. Of course, women have been wearing men’s watches for decades, but Tyler represents a fashion-forward approach to watch collecting that’s spreading like wildfire in influential circles. He picks out watches like an accessory – considered with the same regard as a Goyard wallet or a Globe-Trotter suitcase. In an industry hyper-focused on the wrist, Tyler helped zoom out and reframe watches as an extension of personal style. In a similar vein, comedian and entrepreneur Kareem Rahma bought a vintage steel midsize Cartier Santos because “Jerry Seinfeld and Lou Reed are two of my idols. I wanted it because they rocked it.”
Reference is essential to the watch world – but it’s no longer just James Bond, Paul Newman, and hired talent conveying an image – it’s people who may have always worn watches, but have been historically marginalised from the community and left out of the narrative. Even watch forums, although moderated, were not the friendliest place for women or people of colour – or, really, anyone who didn’t fit the traditional mould.
Robert-Jan Broer, founder and editor-in-chief of the popular watch site Fratello Watches, states that there is now a direct correlation between watchmaker and consumer thanks to social media platforms. “An interesting phenomenon that was unthinkable 10 or 20 years ago is that today people can reach out to the CEO of a watch company using Instagram or by DM, ask a question, and get a response,” says Mr Broer. “Before social media, there was no way a customer had access to the big boss in such an easy way.”
Sliding into your favourite watch CEO’s DMs may result in a response... or even impact product creation. Last year, Swiss watchmaker Girard-Perregaux posted a photo on Instagram of a digital watch called the Casquette. The watch, which had been discontinued following its debut in 1976, unearthed an outpouring of praise and starry-eyed emojis. The femme, funky, almost sleazy ’70s-era style has been back in fashion for quite some time now, and the Casquette scratched the itch for the watch heads. The contagious excitement for the vintage piece resulted in a one-of-one edition for a charity auction and, eventually, an official re-release. And now, Girard-Perregaux, which just celebrated its 231st anniversary, continues to look to Instagram to inform product design.
A younger-leaning, more representative group of people getting into the space simply fosters more creativity – even beyond the bounds of the Swiss marquee brands. Thai designer Patcharavipa Bodiratnangkura, who rose to niche fame within the watch and jewellery community when Rihanna was spotted wearing her hand-altered Rolex King Midas earlier this year, appreciates this wave of openness. “The new generation really excites me to continue to explore watches as a form of art,” says Bodiratnangkura, positioning the practice of customisation as augmenting, rather than detracting from the original timepiece. “They are much more open to investing in watches for their artistic designs, rather than just for their time-keeping functionality.”
Social media doesn’t just nurture the relationship between brand or designer and fan, but also the relationship between client and watch dealer. Buying a luxury timepiece online can be a chaotic experience – google “Rolex Datejust” and thousands of results will pop up, inspiring an anxiety attack for a novice consumer. But professional dealers have taken to Instagram to share their wares, along with thoughtful captions and custom imagery, using the “story” and direct messaging features to spark conversation with potential buyers. Of course, there are grey market sharks swimming about in the aether and scams aplenty, but certain dealers have emerged as benevolent sources towards making your vintage and pre-owned watch dreams come true. Alan Bedwell, aka @foundwell, whose clients range from private collectors to Rihanna to Harrods, is one of the best. “Instagram has evolved into an important, global tool for sharing knowledge, selling and for creating a more personal relationship with each client,” he says. When you buy a watch from someone such as Bedwell, you’re buying from a human being who provides a personalised touch and is at the ready to answer questions – which is especially important for vintage watches, a particularly quirky and high maintenance category.
Instagram content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
“Before Instagram, dealers only had platforms such as eBay and Chrono24 or their own websites, but these outlets are all very transactional,” says luxury watch dealer Zoe Abelson. In the past year, Abelson peeled off from her corporate job at an authorised dealer and founded her own business, Graal (which, according to the New York Times, grossed £4 million in sales during its first six months). “Instagram allows for a great mix of fun and business,” she adds. Yes, watches are serious in that many of them cost the equivalent of many people’s annual salary, but ultimately, how serious can this be? We’re talking about luxury items that are deeply desired but not exactly needed.
This is where accounts such as @brodinkee – whose name is a satirical play on Hodinkee – come in. Yes, even horology is not safe from memes. It’s the brainchild of Lee Candela, whose content comes from years of experience and who has found a footing in the watch world that didn’t always feel like home, despite his relentless enthusiasm. Cracking jokes, often at his own expense, has been a source of happiness and a way to level with what can be a very uptight watch industry.
“Stoic is a very appropriate word for the way that the landscape can feel in the watch industry,” says Candela. “It’s not particularly cold or harsh, but it can definitely feel lonely if you’re experiencing it solo. I’ve always strived to make others feel included and give a sense of belonging to the members of this niche community.”
Though the average Gen Z individual does not have the money to purchase a luxury watch, according to a 2021 Bloomberg report, the segment commands a total of £320 billion in disposable income. And where is this monied demographic getting their information? Social media, of course. Specifically, TikTok, a platform that to date has been largely brushed aside (and maybe even feared) by the industry.
Creative consultant and content creator Nolan White shares videos with his 170,000+ followers on TikTok about fashion, lifestyle, and watches. I discovered him through an educational clip he created about the vintage, underrated Universal Genève Polerouter and was instantly convinced of the platform’s potential influence over a nascent watch consumer.
TikTok content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
“TikTok is an incredibly powerful vehicle for getting the next generation involved in the collecting community,” says White. “Young kids are able to get bite-sized bits of valuable information with ease.” Some of White’s best-performing content is about watches, garnering interest from both seasoned collectors and younger newcomers. “Whether someone has the funds to buy their dream watch right now or they’re establishing their aspirational goal to own a certain piece down the line, TikTok has made it very easy for people to find what they like and learn how to go about procuring it.”
Critics of social media’s impact on the watch world will lament a lack of focus, fact-checked information and a homogenisation of tastes. This has, after all, been its impact on every other industry that has opened Pandora’s box and embraced its mind-numbing control. However flawed platforms may be, and whatever eventual destruction they may lead to, social media remains productive to an industry that progresses at a glacial pace. The boundless creativity that has arisen in presentation and product, the wide inclusion of dedicated enthusiasts, and the launch of a thousand new collections is something to be celebrated. So for now, let’s blissfully scroll... before it all goes to hell.
Brynn Wallner is founder and creative director of dimepiece.co, which is dedicated to all things women and watches.
