ii) Welcome to Baselworld
These days, very few watch advertisements feel the need to address the issue of timekeeping, or any of the other topics that would have occupied the thoughts of our grandparents, such as reliability or the length between service intervals. Instead, the advertisements tell principally of wonder and adventure, often in the form of humankind against the elements or humankind achieving ultimate goals – a watch to wear when competing in the America’s Cup, a timepiece to wear when you’ve won seven Grand Slams. In the promotional world of poetic astronomy and harsh, unyielding environments, accuracy is a given, and the accuracy is far beyond what anyone may require on their wrist. In fact, no one needs a watch to tell the time at all these days, for we may tell the time in a hundred other trusted ways. What began at the church and town hall, and then moved to the factories and railways, has now, by act of transistor, atomic physics and satellite, been made infallible and omnipresent. The world – the computing world, the navigational world, the money world, the entire industrial world and our exploration of the universe beyond – all of it depends on accurate timekeeping, but none of it depends on anyone looking at their watch. And yet we do this still with conditioned regularity, to the point where the world’s largest tech company decided recently that it had to make a timepiece of its own. And to the point where, when the world’s most renowned makers of timepieces gather in Basel each year to launch their fabulous new wares at an airport-size trade fair called Baselworld, they do so in an atmosphere of unfettered jubilation and wealth, and in the knowledge that, despite selling us something we already have and therefore don’t need, it is also something we will happily buy for ever more. Why? Because some men want jangly stuff to define their status, and have done since the time of Henry VIII. Suited and moneyed men don’t get away with wearing much jewellery these days, not least when they are posing up mountain and beneath lake, so a watch solves all desires and expectations. Early in 2015, Sebastian Vivas, the man who runs the museum at Audemars Piguet, admitted that he wasn’t afraid of the Apple Watch, but what really scared him was the day when men accepted they could wear gemstones ‘without a time-keeping pretext’.
As with music and fashion, the design of a watch will always be subject to the vagaries of taste: one decade we covet heavy chronographs, the next it is superfine elegance. But the surprise is that, even in the digital age, watches themselves have proved to be – or are sold as – perennial tools of necessity. But still, why the watch? Surely there’s an answer beyond salesmanship and consumerism and showing off: ‘My salary and bonus affords me this absurd piece of jewellery, and I believe the adverts when they tell me this is a way of expressing my unique personality and displaying my appreciation of the finer things.’ The science historian James Gleick has observed that human anatomy meets data processing only twice – in the brain and in the wristwatch. He observed this in 1995, writing that watches had recently expanded their ability – albeit often in a clunky box-like form – to carry altimeters, depth finders and compasses, and ‘announce your appointments . . . monitor your pulse and blood pressure . . . store phone numbers . . . play music.’3 Today, our ability to over-engineer and miniaturise has reached new levels: a small object once obsessed with displaying only one important thing can now also display 56 less important things.4 Once you had to wind it twice a day, and the snob value was in its precision: the closer it was to the church bells, the more you crowed. Nowadays, in a busy world, winding takes too much time, and so the task is taken away from us, the horological equivalent of the dishwasher; you need merely shake your arm in normal day-to-day activity, and the spiral mainspring will power the drivetrain automatically, and the hands will turn with sure precision.
But there is another reason for the proliferation of the wristwatch beyond our innate desire to preen. Telling the time has, since sometime in the fifteenth century, been the way we display our mechanical and technological mastery. A watch may be something to show off to a colleague at work, but may also represent something grander, something astronomical: we have achieved this magnificent feat of engineering, and in so doing we have aligned our stars and gone some way to mastering the very nature of time itself. What began as a pendulum and evolved into an escapement has now become a tiny, light and elegant contraption to regulate a frantic world. The world we have made, accelerating almost beyond our control, was created in large part by the clock and the watch – the ability to take our destinies inside, away from the universal cues of the heavens. A watch of precision may still suggest that we are nominally in charge. But does a more expensive, rarer, thicker, thinner and more complicated watch suggest we are more in charge than others, or more in charge than before? The advertisers would have it that way.
Baselworld has chosen its name well. It is indeed a world of its own, held each March in a multi-tiered exhibition hall of 140,000 square metres, and most of the big brands have created a nation state within it. When I visited in 2014, for example, Breitling had built a huge rectangular tank containing hundreds of tropical fish above its stand, for no other reason than that it could. And it wasn’t a stand, it was a ‘Pavilion’. Elsewhere, Tissot and Tudor had giant walls of flashing disco lights above their wares, while TAG Heuer had placed one of its watchmakers at a bench at the front of its pavilion to demonstrate how doubly difficult it was to build a watch while being watched. Just as motor racing fans love the occasional crash, TAG Heuer aficionados stand around waiting for their man to drop a screw on the carpet.
I crushed my way into the Hublot conference with José Mourinho, then still the Chelsea manager, the company’s latest brand ambassador. Every watch company needs its ambassadors: the fact that they do not usually wear the watch while achieving their greatest feats is not a major consideration. Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have signed for Audemars Piguet and Jacob & Co. Alongside Mourinho, Hublot also has Usain Bolt. Breitling has John Travolta and David Beckham, Montblanc Hugh Jackman, TAG Heuer Brad Pitt and Cameron Diaz, Rolex Roger Federer, IWC Ewan McGregor, and Longines Kate Winslet. Patek Philippe, ever keen to market itself as a brand with longevity and cross-generational worth, has shied away from asking, say, Taylor Swift or other shooting stars to represent its interests. Instead, it celebrates its client list from another era, starting with Queen Victoria.
Mourinho has just flown in to Basel from the Chelsea training ground at Cobham. He is wearing a grey raincoat over grey cashmere knitwear, and he accepts his watch with light applause and a short speech about how he has been part of the ‘Hublot family’ for a long time as a fan, but now it’s all been made official (i.e. he’s received his bank transfer). His watch is called the King Power ‘Special One’, almost the size of a fist, 18-carat ‘king gold’ with blue carbon, a self-winding Unico manufacture Flyback Chronograph with 300 components, 48mm case, all the mechanics exposed on the dial side, blue alligator strap, a skeleton dial, a power reserve of 72 hours, an edition of 100 and a price of $44,200. Just like Mourinho, the blurb says, ‘The watch is provocative . . . the robust exterior hides the genius below.’ Astonishingly, it’s both stunning and hideous at the same time. Call for availability.
The strangest thing about the Hublot King Power was not that it looked like an armoured tank, but that it didn’t keep very accurate time. When the popular American magazine WatchTime conducted tests on an earlier model, it found it gained between 1.6 to 4.3 seconds a day, which is not what you’d expect from a Swiss watch costing so much. My Timex Expedition Scout does better, losing about 18 seconds a month, or about 4 minutes annually. Four minutes annually, in the scheme of things, is nothing. You can run a mile in that, but it takes longer to stroll the length of the Baselworld carpeted walkways. Because I only had Timex money and not Hublot money I spent most of my time at the fair looking at the marketing, the thing that had brought me here in the first place. I particularly liked the text for the Mondaine Stop2go, which, as with most Mondaine watches, modelled itself on the Swiss railway clock. But this on
e was designed to run fast for 58 seconds and then stop at the top of the dial for two seconds before moving on again. It was an unnerving thing to see on the watch itself – time really standing still – but I was also thrown by the accompanying tagline: ‘What does two seconds mean to you?’
At the Victorinox Swiss Army stand was a man who said that his watches reflected the same attributes as its knives, being both functional and reliable. This year the brand’s ‘hero’ watch was the Chrono Classic, ‘all about the long and the short’ in its ability to house both a perpetual calendar and a chronograph capable of timing a hundredth of a second. But this would have been all rather too conventional for the people milling around the MCT stand marvelling at its Sequential Two S200, a watch that had clearly had enough of conventional timekeeping by hands, and instead promoted hours ‘indicated by four generous blocks, each composed of five triangular prisms’. The hour ‘appears in a remarkably readable manner through an open “window”, while the others are hidden by a segment turning counter-clockwise every 60 minutes’. There is clearly no point asking ‘why?’ with a watch like this, anymore than you would ask ‘why?’ with a Picasso.
Although the majority of the brands were aimed at overachieving men, overachieving women were also welcomed with promotional baloney. At Hermès, the Dressage L’Heure Masquée ‘affords a permanent opportunity to make the “great escape” and to seize only the moments that truly count’. Fendi took ‘fur towards peaks that have not been explored for almost a century . . . a precious strap in two-tone mink’. The Crazy Carats watch revealed ‘three different types of gemstones according to the mood of the moment’. At Christophe Claret, the Margot resembled a daisy, ‘a unique and patented complication that will steal women’s hearts: a world first! A push at 2 o’clock and the watch springs to life, as though abandoned to nature’s whims, by hiding one petal, sometimes two, impossible to say.’ And then there was Dubey & Schaldenbrand, and its Coeur Blanc. This displayed two hands in a ring of diamonds, which ‘seem to float on the dial, as though nothing holds them there but their own power of seduction’. They ‘embrace the caseband, form one with the attachments, twinkle like stars on the crown, and come to a dazzling conclusion on the buckle of the strap’.
I also came to a dazzling conclusion: these watches all had one thing in common beyond their cost, intricacy and madness. Everywhere I went, all the watches showed roughly the same time. Not the accurate time, because that would have been too difficult: what was the correct time in this airless pristine hall of fake pavilions? Why spoil the illusion of this moneyed weightlessness by imposing a stricture on it? Instead, almost every watch on show was stuck at around ten past ten. Why then? A watch set at 10.10 appears to be ‘smiling’; it leaves the face free at 3 o’clock, the usual position for the date; it forms a pleasant and balanced appearance, ensuring the hands do not overlap and do not obscure the manufacturer’s name at the top of the dial. Timex sets its promotional watches to 10.09:36, although adverts from the 1950s show 8.20; this was consciously flipped to avoid its watch faces looking downcast and frowning. These days, there is a conscious effort to ship all its customer watches also set at 10.09:36, for a setting six seconds earlier at 10.09:30 would obscure what it calls its ‘secondary language’ of features, including the Indiglo illumination and the water pressure depth. Mondaine has chosen 10.10 precisely; Rolex favours 10.10:31; TAG Heuer 10.10:37; the Apple Watch has gone for 10.09:30 on both analogue and digital faces (and it used to always show 9.42 a.m. on its iPhone ads, the time Steve Jobs first unveiled the phone in California). In 2008, the New York Times conducted a pop-scientific survey of this trend, finding that all but three watches in Amazon’s bestselling 100 men’s watches were set to roughly 10.10, while it found a rare exception from Ulysse Nardin in its magazine: its watches were set at 8.19 (a company executive explained the Swiss manufacturer was not trying to change the world, it was merely a clearer way of displaying its calendar. No such problem obscuring the day/date in the middle of the face at Rolex, although here there were other rulebooks: in the Rolex world it was always, and perhaps always will be, Monday 28.
At the Timex stand it was all about lifestyle. There were photos of beautiful people sitting around campfires with the straplines ‘Wear it Well’ and ‘Get Outside’ and information about the brand’s ‘Fall Lookbook’. These campaigns were obviously very different from those surrounding the brand when it began in the 1950s, when the television advertising entailed strapping a watch to the end of an arrow and shooting it through a pane of glass (tagline: ‘It takes a licking and goes on ticking’). Another advertisement was titled ‘SHOCK!’ and featured a man with a mallet: ‘Timex watches successfully withstand forces equivalent to being thrown against a concrete wall!’ But my favourite advert wasn’t an advert at all, it was just brilliant PR: in May 1981, the front page of the Boston Globe reported that a man from New York had swallowed his Timex whole when confronted by a mugger on the violent streets. The watch was removed from the man’s stomach five months later, and the surgeon was delighted to report that although the time was a little imprecise, what with all that darkness and swill, the watch was still ticking.
After my stroll I went into a large hall for the opening press conference. A grand procession of dignitaries was followed by something akin to a re-enactment of victory at Troy. The speakers had each endured vast amounts of toilette and coiffure, and they each had their own piece of good news: the fair this year is the biggest, the brightest, the brashest and the most unashamedly boastful watch and jewellery show there has ever been in one place, so hoorah for us, and lucky you to be a part of it. There are, apparently, 4,000 journalists present at the fair, which is almost certainly more than covered two world wars. About a tenth of them are in the hall for the opening speeches and the slide presentation, and many of these are from the Far East with interpreters in their ears. The PowerPoint says: The value of Swiss watch exports are up 1.9 per cent on the previous year, a value of 21.8 billion Swiss francs in 2013. The trend is inexorably upwards: exports are SF8.6 billion higher than five years before. The trend for cheap Swiss watches is down – a 4.5 per cent decline in watches valued up to SF200 – but at the upper end, the end that counts, it’s all good: a 2.8 per cent increase in watches costing SF3,000+.
That was in 2014. A year later, the mood had changed and darkened. There was a cloud over Switzerland, and the threat from Apple Watch was only a part of it. There was also global financial insecurity to contend with. The Swiss franc was strong, which meant prices looked more expensive. Demand in China and Japan was down, and the market in Hong Kong had all but disappeared. Fluctuations in the rouble had hit Russian orders. The Richemont group had reported something unfamiliar in its recent profits: a flat line, not the usual increases that used to greet its shareholders. One chief executive at Zenith, a nineteenth-century Swiss brand that was now part of the luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, told the Financial Times, ‘There has been a lot of turmoil and no one has any idea what will happen next.’
But other watchmakers took a more relaxed view, as befits an industry that’s grown fat on more than 200 years of profit. The Swiss would take a dip, they believed, but the Swiss would then surface triumphantly. The beautiful and impossibly engineered products they made for the world would continue to dazzle with their refinements and complications and unasked-for lunacy, and would forever sell us the time in a way we desire but never need. Tradition and craftsmanship still counted for a lot in the pixellated world; wearing a mechanical watch simply makes us more human, and that is something we may always like to feel. So no need to panic just yet; it wasn’t like the Quartz Crisis of the 1970s or anything cataclysmic like that.5
iii) Uh-oh
In September 1975, an advertisement on the front cover of the Horological Journal featured a close-up photograph of a chrome-plated day/date battery-powered Timex held between thumb and forefinger in a person’s hand, and the line ‘Introducing the Quartz watch with the incredible pri
ce tag’. There were no gimmicks or feats of endurance in this campaign, no arrows or glass or sledgehammers, although there was a little tag dangling from the side of the watch with a handwritten price: £28.
This was not cheap (£28 was the equivalent of about £250 in 2016), but it was good value for what it promised to do, which was tell the time better than any watch made in Switzerland. Inside the Horological Journal, a trade publication founded in 1858, an article called the watch ‘the horological bargain of the decade’ and ‘a milestone in the history of horology’.
‘Its accuracy takes it into the middle-upper end of the market place and it is so easy to change parts it is a watchmaker’s dream.’ The customer fared well too: ‘What does a customer require from a watch today? Style, easy to read, accuracy and a fair price? The Timex Model 63 Quartz has all of these in abundance.’ What it had above all was the essence of quartz: a tiny piece of crystal that resonated at a high and fixed frequency when powered by a battery. This steady signal was then transmitted to an oscillator, an electronic circuit that regulated the gears that turned the watch hands. The movement itself had been around since the 1920s, but its miniaturisation had only been achieved in prototype by Seiko and Casio in Japan in the late 1960s. Its price had taken it beyond the general consumer, although the excitement and novelty of quartz in the early 1970s – the very idea of a precision-cut piece of rock not only doing away with the centuries-old movement of winding and power storage but also keeping near-perfect time – had led collectors to Japan and the USA, and they had paid hundreds of dollars for early examples. But now, through mass production and the marketing potential of Timex and its main American rival Bulova (which had developed the Accutron, a watch fitted with a tuning fork in place of the far less accurate standard vibrating balance wheel), the electronic watch represented a change of philosophy. The new quartz Timex of 1975 oscillated at a frequency of 49,152 cycles a second, which was then divided electronically by a microcircuit to drive the hands; each step of the sweeping second hand takes a third of a second. From the outside, the watch looked like any other. But this was a solid-state watch, so called because of its lack of moving parts, and it converted quartz oscillation into electronic pulses driving tiny electronic lights – the digital display lighting up the segments on the face. The tiny alarms that would soon wreck a night at the theatre were also a sign that the Japanese and Americans thought they had seen the future.
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