Over the past few years, the watch industry has entertained the view that watches should no longer be labelled as either men’s or women’s.
A watch is a watch. Unisex. As genderless and free of any biological impediment as a tin of baked beans. Boys and girls eat the same beans, right?
This, as an intellectual avenue, isn’t the shortest of cul-de-sacs. It’s true that a watch has no chromosomes, no reproductive organs and isn’t much bothered which restroom it goes into.
Its purpose is to tell the time, which isn’t a gender or sex thing either (no jokes about how long it takes to get ready, please). And if you leave it in the garden for a while, it won’t start hunting mammoths or building nests.
And because of that, anyone who does have chromosomes can choose to wear any watch they like. Provided, that is, it doesn’t already belong to someone else, and isn’t one of those James Bond watches that can blow stuff up. I think you need a licence for that.
But even so, I can’t get myself to the point where I agree we should bin the men’s and women’s labels, as if they were no more palatable than Bill Maher’s gag-reel. I don’t think that would be fair, but I particularly think it wouldn’t be fair to women.
The unisex watch is a get out of jail free card for lazy brands disinclined to bother figuring out what a great women’s watch might look like and what women might actually want
Which might be to speak for the other half of the population, a tack I’m obliged to admit is like diving into shark-infested waters without so much as a Speedo. But here we are.
So. How so?
Let’s start at an unspecified point in the future when all watches are lumped together.
No men’s watches. No women’s watches. Just watches.
Sublimely gifted though we are as a species, none of us can claim to be so independent as never to require structure and guidance. And when it comes to buying a watch, we’re no different.
Ok, these days many who walk into a watch store already know what they want, but only because they’ve done their research.
And research starts with a drop-down menu, even if metaphorically. What kind of watch do we want? The men’s/women’s split is one, if not the first and most effective of segmentation tools. A helpful signpost. Taking it away would be like asking Google Maps for directions without telling it where your journey begins.
Then there’s the question of size (again, no smirking at the back). And ergonomics.
Inside the watch bubble, diameter, thickness and lug width are part of the vernacular, but to the horological neophyte, the nuances of a few mill here or there are gobbledygook.
I should know. Before I’d learned watchspeak, I bought a vintage Omega off of the internet. Lovely thing, but it wasn’t until I unpacked it and put it on that I learned that 34mm is just a bit gamine for a man six and a half feet tall.
Rarely has an excitement balloon been pricked so swiftly. For most buyers, the labels are necessary if they’re to avoid that mistake.
If it would be impractical, a genderless watch landscape would also be duller.
Men’s and women’s tastes tend to be different – gloriously, joyfully different – but the creativity those differences inspire would fade. We’d end up with drab homogeneity, a grey design soup.
And this is where the notion of genderless watches becomes particularly unfair to women. Because you can bet your bottom dollar genderless watches would be designed – on the QT, of course – for men’s tastes and wrist sizes first.
As one colleague put it to me recently (and yes, it was a female colleague, but I know that alone doesn’t prove the point), the unisex watch is a get out of jail free card for lazy brands disinclined to bother figuring out what a great women’s watch might look like and what women might actually want.
The unfortunate irony is that the genderless watch movement has been led by women, but I’d put it that the solution is not watches for all, but better women’s watches.
None of which is to say that men shouldn’t wear women’s watches and women shouldn’t wear men’s watches. Nor that what constitutes men’s and women’s watches will or should never change. Nor that a watch should never be unisex. That would undermine the point. Which is essentially about choice.
If a consumer can choose a blue watch over a green one, or a big one over a small one, why not a women’s over a men’s?
It’s also the choice to recognize that equality and sameness are not the same thing. Men’s and women’s watches are almost never the same, not least while the “pink it and shrink it” trope wanes, but they’re always of equal value, certainly on objective merits alone.
On top of that, it’s the choice a brand makes to create a watch for a specific audience. And the choice that audience makes to buy it. Rolling all watches into a big genderless mush would make that choice harder and less interesting. And who’s that good for?
I wonder if our view on this will boil down to whether we think of our watches as we do our cars or our underwear.
Cars aren’t sold by gender (although there’s a good argument they’re only made for men), but underwear is. Ok, so I’m more likely to wear my 34mm Omega than frilly lingerie, but you get my drift.
How much energy there is left in this debate, I don’t know.
Some brands have done away with the men’s and women’s navigation tools already and their collections become a minefield, unless we assume that all buyers speak case diameter. Perhaps a solution is to add a third option to the drop-down and categorise some watches as unisex for those that come looking for them. There’s fair.
Life’s a spectrum. A kaleidoscope. Let’s not narrow it down or drain it of colour with well intended but flawed notions of niceness and neutrality, confusing sameness and equality and excluding the women who want a woman’s watch and the men who want a man’s watch at the same time.
Because telling the consumer everything they buy should be the same is not equality. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s communism. Vive la différence!