A New Holy Trinity of Watch Brands for the Non-Billionaire Class

Almost 10 years ago, I fell victim to a terrible affliction. In desperation over the state of the world, I waded, first gingerly then frantically then pathologically, into the vast sea of my first and only hobby: watch collecting. Over the years, as the world continued to disintegrate, as Trump One morphed into Covid then into January 6th and finally into Trump Two, the hobby consumed me. Whenever my phone pinged with the latest disaster, I typed in www.hodinkee.com, the foremost site for watch nerds, and was instantly summoned into a private, strangely ordered world. Stone dials riveted me. Balance cocks made me dizzy. The art, the social history, the engineering — all of it made me forget the daily cataclysm around me, if only for a moment.

Watches kept me, as my therapist (also a watch collector) said, “regulated.” I spent hours per day looking at them, talking about them, getting trashed on Old Fashioneds with fellow collectors at secret watch meetups and galas. One watch became 10 became 20, until finally I had amassed 31, a timepiece for every day of the month. I wrote a novel called Lake Success, which featured a watch collector as the main protagonist. I even traveled to a magical city most New Yorkers such as myself have only read about in books ­— Chicago — to lecture on watches at an event sponsored by the Swiss consulate. And yet, in some ways, I was no more than a horological debutante, for I had never attended the premier event of those consumed by my passion — the annual gathering in Geneva called Watches and Wonders. This needed to change.