For Watch Nerds, There's Nothing Like Rolliefest
The event is a reminder of how even the best contemporary watches cannot capture the charm of a unique secondhand timepiece.
It was only the first day of Rolliefest on Sept. 26, and grown men were already emotional. “This is a room of my favorite people,” the actor, director and watch aficionado Fred Savage gushed to me last Friday. The room in question was not small. More than 200 watch geeks had gathered in the entrance hall to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the beloved watch show-and-tell. These were the crème de la crème of global horology, all dressed up, flicking their wrists so their brethren could get a peek at the objects of their desire.
“I just got this bezel for Rollifest,” Henry Flores, founder of the Classic Watch Club, told me, showing a sumptuous pale-pink-and-blue bezel on his vintage Rolex GMT-Master, which also allowed him to follow a second time zone. We were in fine company: I spotted the nattily dressed collector Morgan King of Los Angeles, the Cartier-wearing TikTok maestro Mike Nouveau and the tall bespectacled gentleman dealer Eric Wind, who’s responsible for most of my own vintage pieces. I rushed over to him with my 1960s GMT, worried that a very expensive spider crack was starting to form on part of the dial. Ten seconds later, Wind issued his diagnosis: “There’s a little hair stuck under the crystal.” He saved me five figures’ worth of depreciation.