re: OT Watch Snobs: Thoughts on Oris?

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Anytime I see a post that says Rolex is for wannabes, or Rolex sucks, or who needs to wear any watch....I know the comment is either rooted in jealousy or ignorance.

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According to my favorite watch journalist, Jack Forster, there are three levels of Rolex Appreciation. Jack has the ability to articulate things people have been around watches for a long time and know but can't quite put there finger on it. Looking back I went through these exact stages and know tons of people that did to. I would link it if he had written it on Hodinkee but I am going to copy it since it is on Forbes and loaded with ads. Rummy, Chicken "this is not the post you are looking for" said while doing a Jedi wave. Note Jack wrote this in 2012, had he written it today it would have contained far more about price and supply and demand. I added emphasis to the three stages. BTW I have been told I like Jack's writing because we both make liberal use of parenthesis.

The Rolex Problem: A (Semi) Rational Look At The World's Most Recognized Watch
Jack Forster
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If it's troublesome and annoyingly expensive, I'm all over it.
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Sep 3, 2012,11:38am EDT



I have a friend who is a watch journalist (strange, but true.) This individual, who shall remain nameless, has been covering the watch industry for decades; there are few who know the ins, outs, industry gossip, and inside stories as well. And this person hates Rolex --the mere mention of the name is enough to evoke the visceral hostility most of us reserve for things like Bernie Madoff, or the DMV. The loathing this person feels for Rolex is beyond appeal, argument, or reason --to the journalist in question, they are an uncommunicative, arrogant, unimaginative brand the ownership of which marks you as hopelessly uninformed at best and a pathetic, tasteless, ostentation-loving parvenu at worst.

I have another friend, who is a watch blogger (I know, what were the odds.) As with the aforementioned journalist, this is a person who has known and loved watches for decades --not professionally (this particular individual's real occupation is on a much more global stage than watches) but as a collector, who has over the years amassed a number of the most elegantly crafted, classically beautiful watches --gorgeous openworked movements, exotic complications, drop-dead gorgeous classic time-only dress watches --I've ever seen. The last time I saw him, he was wearing a vintage Rolex Submariner on a NATO strap --a NATO strap, sacré bleu! --and looking at it with the uncritical adoration of a mother for a dewey newborn.


The latter event was by far the more jarring --cognoscenti have loved to hate Rolex for years, but seeing that Sub on the wrist of a collector with undeniably great knowledge and indisputably refined taste was a bit of a shock; not because I dislike the company or the watches (I don't) but because it was so out of character, and as such, a symptom of something very interesting. Rolexes, especially vintage models, have in record time gone from being --at least among many serious connoisseurs --red flags for the worst kind of tasteless conspicuous consumption, to being, for lack of a better word, cool. (And expensive.) The boom in interest in vintage Rolex is all the more fascinating for having been largely autonomous (not only did Rolex not have anything to do with it, the company rather charmingly didn't seem to know what to make of it at first) as well as for having renewed enthusiast interest in its current collection.


What gives?

It's one of the bigger ironies of the watch world that a company which is famous for its staid designs, glacially slow product evolution, and dispassionately frosty corporate façade (in a 2011 interview with Bloomberg, Rolex's Jean-Noel Bioul, the firm's international sponsorship director, said, "We have the reputation of operating like a Swiss bank,") should inspire such diametrically opposed, apparently irreconcilable, and equally passionate views. For someone who's just getting interested in watches, sooner or later the phenomenon that is Rolex has to be dealt with, and few leave the encounter unmoved.

To some extent both the haters and fans are moved by the same lever: the sheer success of Rolex as a watch brand (the single largest luxury watch brand in the world, with an annual production approaching one million watches a year) as well as its habitual secretiveness (Rolex is privately held and notoriously reticent; one sometimes feels its entire global PR department consists of a solitary bored functionary in a small room with a well-worn rubber stamp that says "No Comment") make it a lightning rod for comments fiercely pro and devastatingly con, and the incredible boom in the last few years in prices paid for vintage Rolexes has only made the arguments more heated. (In 2010, a Rolex model 5510 Submariner --a very early version of the company's most bluntly utilitarian diver's watch --sold at auction at Christie's for $98,500, and prices have only gone up since then.)

Less rare vintage Rolexes can be had for less --recently pre-owned models for much less --but for older, more collectible vintage models in original condition --collectors want that yellowed, faded, scruffy-looking original dial and you can destroy the value of a $100,000 watch by replacing the old dial with a new one --the general rule of thumb is that the watch will sell for several orders of magnitude more than the original owner paid for it.


Over the years I've been interested --in sickness and in health, for richer and (usually) for poorer --in watches, I've watched the attitude of the collector community change drastically with respect to Rolex, and it seems to me a good place to start is with as straightforward a statement of fact as one can: Rolex is the world's largest manufacturer of mid-priced luxury watches, whose most popular models have changed relatively little in design over several decades, and which makes extremely reliable, accurate watches with durable, well-designed movements.

With that basic proposition in place it is possible to characterize three basic levels of Rolex appreciation.

1. Rolex Is The Best (New Guy Version.) The fact that Rolex designs evolve so slowly has done something very important --it's ensured that if you have one on, a disproportionate number of people are going to know you are wearing (a) a Rolex and (b) an expensive watch. The upside is that it can and does say you're a person of means (there is nothing wrong, per se, with conspicuous consumption if that's what you know you want) but the downside is that a certain percentage of observers will conclude, rightly or wrongly, that advertising your affluence is the only (or at least the main) reason you bought the watch. You may have bought a Rolex simply because you've decided you like watches, and you've heard Rolex is a good watch --unfortunately, that's not going to stop some people from assuming you had more ignoble motives. Sooner or later, though, the new owner may wonder why so many self-styled watch experts are sneering, which leads to . . .