There is a theory doing the rounds that Switzerland’s obsession with making modern versions of vintage watches is coming to an end. If there is any truth to the hypothesis, Robin Swithinbank is finding it very hard to see in practice.
In an interview for the New York Times published in March, HYT’s saviour-in-chief Davide Cerrato suggested to me that vintage-inspired design had just about had its day. If true, that would mean that like the internal combustion engine, beige lume, retro case shapes and watches PVD-coated in whimsy aren’t long for this world.
Anyone else says this, and it would barely register. But Mr Cerrato has earned the right to at least make the forecast. Having put Tudor back on the map with the 1950s-inspired Black Bay a decade ago, and then moved to Montblanc where he found a visual link between the brand’s watches and its inherited Minerva heritage, he’s an expert in selling watches to people who want things to look the way they used to – and wish things were the way they used to be.
Of course, he’s also biased. He’s now at the helm of an avant-garde watch brand resurrected from the ashes of the pandemic – or those of the previous management’s shortcomings, as you will – so he’s bound to fall on the side of watch design’s nouvelle vague. But I can’t help think he’s got this one wrong.
Because for all the endless talk of innovation and novelty, the watch industry is built on nostalgia. Yes, watches are better than they were 20 years ago, in measurable terms such as accuracy and reliability, certainly. But judging by what’s landing at Watches and Wonders this week, the currency of nostalgia is still whipping anything mined by a supercomputer.
I could at this point list the most vintage releases from Geneva, but I might as well read you the phone book for all that it would prove revealing. Beyond the Carré des Horlogers, where an entertaining but commercially immaterial band of experimental independents are small-batching deliciously inventive watches, the halls are drenched by a wave of design nostalgia.
Why? Here we might call on the economists and their theory of revealed preferences, which encourages us to concentrate not on what people say (“I will lose weight”) but on what they do (eat biscuits). Luxury watch buyers’ revealed preferences are there in plain sight. They may want the next big thing, just as I want to learn Italian. But then they buy a Rolex Oyster Perpetual, just as I decide that I can get by in Rome with the words pizza, gelato and Moretti.
If that doesn’t ring true, apply the theory to Audemars Piguet’s spot-the-difference collection of ‘new’ 50th anniversary Royal Oaks. Or to TAG Heuer’s didn’t-they-already-do-that Gulf-liveried Monaco. Or simply to Rolex’s relentless market dominance. New watches in name only – because that’s what people buy.
Nostalgia itself is both a symptom and a condition. Today, any one of a litany of dissatisfactions could fuel it, but we’ve always looked back, and every generation has its gripes – and its conviction that the old days were somehow better.
That might make nostalgia intellectually porous, or at least singling it out as unique to our generation would, but that doesn’t mean it’s commercially meaningless. A moment spent looking at the world’s largest watch brands shows us they are entirely dependent on designs of the past to lure in consumers of the future.
Picking out just one – memories of Cartier’s Fine Watchmaking Division and its grip on the Parisian house’s novelty cycle are fading fast. Under current chief executive Cyrille Vigneron it has returned to what it does best, and what its consumers actually want.
Not unreasonably, the brand calls its collection of reworked golden oldies montres de forme, but whether it’s Santos, Panthère or Tank, its watches speak a design language written long before today’s consumers were born, but which they still love to hear.
Will they always? I don’t remember exactly when I first wrote the now clichéd words “vintage-inspired” about a wristwatch, but I do recall feeling at the time that because it was a trend it wouldn’t be long before I never had to write them again. But then in 2005, I was quite convinced Facebook was a passing fad, like tamagotchis and yo-yos, which would indicate that just as I was wrong 15-odd years ago, I could well be wrong now.
And that would mean Mr Cerrato could be right. I just don’t see it. You can’t walk around a big brand watch factory these days without being introduced to a heritage director, whose job it is to unearth a golden nugget from the company archives that can be ground down into commercial and communication gold dust. There’s never been more equity in the past.
And you may say that might be the case now, but that the cacophony generated by NFTs and the metaverse (by me in these pages just last month) will drown the vintage aesthetic out. But it won’t. While some brands mint NFTs for the Alphas and their luxury skins, others will never bother. Zenith’s Julien Tornare has already said thoughts of his Icons collection of scarce vintage pieces will be populating his dreams over the next few years, and not digitally coded piece-uniques. The new stuff is always unknown; the old reassuring.
For consumers who want to diet but can’t stop eating Hobnobs, a mechanical watch that looks like it’s been around forever isn’t going to lose its appeal, no matter how excited they get by a watch that tells the time using HYT’s clever “meca-fluidic technology”. Even more, the vintage-inspired school of design isn’t just a nod to how watches used to be – it’s a sign of how they always will be.