Issue 140: Ask Me Anything (free!)
The future of geezer watches; why yellow gold is so niche; what makes a good watch review and the best Rolex nicknames
Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that has once again been pleased - actually, delighted - to answer your questions. We’ve got three simple questions this week each of which prompts an in-depth answer that reveals something about the watch world today. Elsewhere, a long-overdue return to self-promotion corner and some added detail on the Breguet Marie Antoinette. And finally: are we all being too gloomy? Read to the end for that existential threat to my cynical outlook…
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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:
Ask Me Anything
Your questions answered! Remember, you can read every past AMA here - all free from the paywall this week. Got a question you didn’t submit in time? Send it over, I’ll answer it next time.
Geezer watches: a flash in the pan or a trend with legs? - The Lost Spring Bar
This ties in with the question on yellow gold, below, to an extent. My one-sentence answer is “flash in the pan, but maybe not entirely so”. Obviously that requires a little more explanation1, so here goes.
For the uninitiated, a ‘geezer watch’ is a dress watch from the late 1970s to early 1990s, in precious metal - but for maximum points, in yellow gold - with some or all of the following features: intricate and unusual case and bracelet design; a dial in semi-precious stone or mother-of-pearl; diamond hour markers or other gem-setting. They are watches, as the name implies, with a flamboyant, slightly disreputable air, but they are fancier and more delicate than a straight-up gold Daytona or Nautilus (although in the right spec, a Daytona or Nautilus could absolutely qualify). They range from the kind of opal-dial Piaget or AP with woven-gold bracelet that might more naturally be associated with an elegant grandmother, to the Rolex King Midas and some of Gerald Genta’s more all-out creations.
Geezer watches could only exist in a post-Cartier Crash, post-Piaget Polo 79 world. They represent the apogee of the pendulum swing2 away from sports chronographs and divers in the vintage market; a very deliberate move to embrace watchmaking’s least practical side. They are usually slim, relatively small in diameter; the more unusual the shape the better, and they are rarely concerned with complications. They may well be quartz.
I say they are a flash in the pan because the whole term, and as far as I can see, most of the market for such watches, seems confined to quite a small number of people. If you’re Mike Nouveau (a more fitting name for the era of wealth that originally spawned the geezer watch could not present itself) and his cast of regular characters, it’s life. Justin Hast is there. The Heist Out team are there - the sale they organised with Sotheby’s last year in Geneva is either the high watermark of geezer watch mania, or its official arrival into the mainstream. Because this is where I have to hedge my bets a little; ‘geezer watches’ will, by its very nature, remain a niche concern for a hipsterish crowd of collectors and influencers, highly active on social media, but it is at the same time the tip of the spear when it comes to a much wider market trend.
Consider the rapid boom in stone dials - so rapid that even Timex has cashed in, which may well bring the whole thing crashing down in shards - or the slightly longer-lasting fondness for rainbow-set bezels. Consider the investment status of the Crash, and the rising tide for obscure Cartier of all kinds. Consider our gradual willingness to reappraise 1990s Blancpain, Breguet, Audemars Piguet and Vacheron Constantin. These sub-trends are all part and parcel of a wider shift towards dressier styles, towards opulent and sometimes baroque decoration, and away from stainless steel, away from sports watches, away from chunky, practical, utilitarian watchmaking. This, for me, is a trend that has several years left to run; it will probably be 2028 before we get thoroughly sick of it.
There is another reason geezer watches will be a flash in the pan, and it’s something that Felix and Andy at OT:The Podcast came up with when I last dropped in on them - geezer watches are so far from what was recently popular that they have been available for relatively cheap sums. There was no demand for them whatsoever a year and a half ago, so dealers could snap them up for quite aggressive prices. I’m not sure how widespread the demand for them really is, once the small circle of enthusiasts that are really wild about them moves on to the next thing, but at some point the market will catch up and slow the whole thing down. This will probably be at about the point when mainstream brands have decided to leap aboard the trend, puncturing its hipster status, and so the wheel of taste rolls on once more.
What do you consider makes for a good, useful watch review, assuming the reviewer has hands-on with the watch? - Steve L
Well Steve, I have my own strong thoughts on what makes a good watch review - in fact, I wrote about it all the way back in Issue 39, which I know a lot of you won’t have read, so I’ve unlocked the paywall for you to go back and have a look.
It’s a subject I’ve returned to a few times, as I’ve written my own reviews. I also can’t promise I’ve always stuck to my own guidelines - certainly my most recent review, the Grand Seiko I crowned my Watch of 2024, was a lot more emotional and personal than usual. I’m probably proudest of this review of the Jaeger-LeCoultre Polaris Chronograph - you didn’t ask, but I just thought I’d mention it. I’m modest like that.
In summary, I would say the concept of a watch review is fraught with pitfalls, but I do think it remains a worthwhile exercise. More than anything, what you need is expertise; it sounds incredibly elitist and gatekeeper-y of me to say this but I speak from personal experience: you need to have handled a lot of watches, and developed a decent understanding of how a watch is made to accurately judge its quality.
However, that is not the same as saying you need to have walked a mile in a man’s shoes, to butcher the phrase. The business of being a journalist - a critic, or a reviewer, in particular - is that of passing judgement on the work of other professionals without being one3 yourself. This isn’t always well understood, not least by those under scrutiny. “Who are you to criticise my work?” is the general response to anything less than 100 per cent positive.
I get it. Ironically, a lot of journalists are very touchy when it comes to criticism of their work (long-time readers will know this for sure). I had a friend at university who wanted to become a food critic; she went and worked as a junior chef in one of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants simply to be able to claim, with authority, that she knew of what she spoke. Now that’s very laudable, and I don’t deny that it’s useful when you want to lament the under-seasoning of a rack of lamb, or praise the fine wobble of a panna cotta. (To my knowledge, she has never put two slices of bread around someone’s head and called them ‘an idiot sandwich’.) But it’s not possible or even desirable in most fields; exposure to the cultural medium is usually enough.
I would have more time for this reaction to criticism if it was evenly applied. But no-one attacks video game reviewers for their inability to code; no-one asks film critics to produce their own blockbuster before expressing a view on Captain America 4. When luxury brands take umbrage at negative commentary, it’s because you dared to break the spell. The thin-skinned nature of some - not all - luxury brands, and the submissive, mealy-mouthed nature of some - not all - watch ‘reviews’ reveal the two most important truths about watch reviewing.
The first, as I wrote in Issue 39 (notwithstanding my conclusion that you can review a watch), is the awkward truth that most people don’t buy watches based on the qualities and criteria that manufacturers claim are important. They buy watches for social status, to flaunt wealth and impress others, or to fulfil the irrational and passionate desires that we call “being a collector”. They buy watches for almost entirely personal, subjective reasons, and rationalise those purchases with reference to objective facts afterwards. So any attempt to review a watch ‘objectively’ already has an uphill struggle.
The second truth is that most journalists and journalistic outlets are too dependent on the brands for revenue to offer anything like a truly objective review, assuming they could navigate all the above challenges. I’ve written about the broken dynamic between brands, media and customers many times before and I’m doing my best to be succinct when it is a nuanced subject, but if you want completely unbiased reviews, you need an independently-financed media whose first loyalty is to its readers. I’m trying that out here as an idea, but I have to also be open and honest and say that I still earn the bulk of my living writing in ‘traditional’ media, so it’s not perfect by any means.
To actually answer your question in one paragraph rather than nine, I would say this. If you’re going to review a watch - or anything for that matter - the important thing is to be intelligent and reasoned in your criticism; to be consistent, and to be fair. You have to consider its target audience, its intended use, its stated claims and its wider context, both in terms of its predecessors and its competitors. If you can assess all that with a clear eye, with the benefit of experience and hopefully with a little wit to help things along, you’ll have done a pretty reasonable job.
What's the go with yellow gold in the industry currently? - Joe
Joe continues (thanks for doing my research for me, Joe):
“Most brands seem to have almost completely stopped using it except for hero pieces. Lange which launched exclusively in yellow gold currently has four models, three of which are 'Flagship Exclusives' and the limited edition Datograph Handwerkskunst. Patek has two wristwatches in yellow (along with three pocket watches), Vacheron two, Breguet two men's pieces and Piaget has the Polo 79.
Cartier and Rolex seem to be the only brands really doing much in yellow gold, and they're the two most successful brands (by 2023 data), and then watches like the VC 222 are a huge success.
So why has yellow seemingly been abandoned?”
It’s funny you frame it that way Joe, because anyone coming into this industry in the last decade or so could be forgiven for thinking that yellow gold was actually on the up - indeed, I have almost certainly written articles to that effect. I know I’ve read them by others.
When I started doing this for a living, yellow gold was almost extinct. You saw it at Rolex, which never stopped using it, and you saw it almost nowhere else. These days there is definitely more of it about - but reports of its widespread return are, I must agree, overstated. So why is it possible to feel like it is definitely back, when you point out that it really isn’t?
What you’ve asked is interesting to me because it gets to the heart of how trends become trends. I think what we have seen, rather than a really substantial move back to yellow gold - which was undoubtedly the preferred, if not at times the only, 18k gold option on the table for most of the 20th century - is a resurgence of two-tone steel and yellow gold. That has put yellow gold front and centre at a lot of lower-priced brands, meaning the metal has become more visible again without it seeming like everyone now has a Rolex ‘President’ Day-Date on their wrist.
That’s one part of it. The other element here is that in the great game of marketing, influence and consumer behaviour, not all brands are equal. There is a lot of yellow gold in Cartier’s range, a fair amount at Bulgari, and quite a lot at Tudor (if you count the two-tone stuff). Those are three brands that have been on hot streaks for much of the last 5-10 years. Throw in a few key launches or revivals - you correctly single out the Piaget Polo 79 and the VC 222 - and you start to see how the yellow gold bandwagon can appear to be gathering momentum without actually consisting of very many watches.
Another element is the marketing narrative that has been built up around different case metals. Yellow gold - particularly in excessive quantities - became so indelibly associated with the 1980s, and up until very recently that’s a decade we’ve all scorned as too brash and garish to take seriously. Rose gold came along in a big way in the 2000s and 2010s and was presented as a more subtle, sophisticated and contemporary choice. In the UK, US and perhaps to a lesser extent, across Europe, millennials were said to be obsessed with rose gold - anyone remember think pieces on ‘millennial pink’ from around 2014? - and whether that was chicken or egg in the endless feedback loop that is the process by which brands attempt to divine what their customers want, it can’t be ignored.
As well as generational shifts, geographic ones play a role. It’s hard to find data on this, but ever since I began exploring the world of watches, it has been the universally received wisdom that rose gold is more popular in Asia, particularly China. Anecdotally this has always been held to be true, and I think if you look at the way retailers merchandise their stock in China, Hong Kong and other nearby markets - that is to say, the way they select which products are more prominent, you will see a lot of rose gold. Supposedly it is a more appealing partner to a stereotypically ‘Asian’ skin tone4. I’m not sure what would happen if yellow gold did really come back in a big way and was perceived as far superior - I suspect a lot of people would suddenly decide it didn’t look so bad against their arm after all. But we’re back in chicken-and-egg territory, because arguably such a shift couldn’t happen without the Chinese market driving the change in the first place.
Yellow gold is enduringly popular in the vintage market, partly because other alloy blends simply don’t exist in anything like such quantities prior to the 1990s or thereabouts. Data from Everywatch seems to show that yellow gold is roughly three to four times as popular as white gold or rose gold at auction - but there’s a weighting here to think about, too. You can’t filter that data by manufacturer, but given that Rolex has never stopped producing yellow gold watches, and that such a high percentage of the vintage/auction market is Rolex, this might not be saying so much about the true popularity of the metal after all. Nevertheless, I do think it’s striking that the historic popularity of yellow gold hasn’t created a broader modern selection, given the industry’s obsession with faithful recreations of bygone watches as a whole. Again, the Piaget Polo 79 springs to mind as a watch that has wielded disproportionate power in our collective imagination.
I like yellow gold precisely because it is so classic. I got my wedding ring made out of yellow gold at a time when white metals were very much en vogue because I didn’t want to feel like I was following fashions with something that I intend to wear for the rest of my life. I like it in watches for a similar reason - but evidently, not enough people feel the same way. Yellow gold is just about popular enough to be used in the most collector-focussed, small-run limited editions, or in a few really popular designs where it’s offered in the spirit of having the widest possible choice. Something I didn’t really touch on, and that I don't have the data available to really dig into, is how many precious-metal watches are only available in yellow gold as opposed to simply offering it as one possible case choice. That, I suspect, would be a really small number indeed.
Out of the all the different Rolex nicknames, which one is your favourite and why? I have a soft spot for an Italian one, the Ovettone (or 'big egg') which is both fun and descriptive - Warren
A wonderful little short question to finish. I’m tempted to talk about the various GMT-Master nicknames, but the thing is I’m getting pulled towards watches I like rather than actually great nicknames in their own right. See also the ‘Jean-Claude Killy’; a prosaic nickname but a super, fantastic watch. I do like the Thunderbird, a version of the Turn-O-Graph given to the USAF air display team, known as the thunderbirds, in the 1950s.
Really, I find myself struggling to improve on your suggestion - or at least agreeing with you that, as an English speaker, the Italians do it best. Ovettone is great - and pleasingly, to go with your ‘big egg’ you could very well find yourself with a Padellone, or ‘big frying pan’, so named for its then-large diameter of 38mm (God, it’s a pretty perfect thing isn’t it?) Other Italian nicknames, such as Sotto or Freccione, bring a poetry to highly mundane descriptions. So that’s my answer: more Italian nicknames please, and less of this ‘Starbucks’, ‘Sprite’ and ‘Rainbow’ nonsense. When did we get so boringly literal? The campaign for more interesting nicknames starts here.
Quick Links
Marie Antoinette’s Watch, Which She Never Saw, Is on Display, at the New York Times.
A return to self-promotion corner! Now that I’m freelancing full time I’m not going to inundate you with every single thing I write - but I was a little proud of this one. I spoke to the director of the Science Museum in London, the director of the Meyer Museum of Islamic Art in Jerusalem (which owns the Marie Antoinette) and was able to add some detail to the story of this watch that I, at least, have never seen reported elsewhere5. I most enjoyed learning that Na’aman Diller, who stole the watch in 1983, disassembled around 40 of the watches he stole and stored all the parts in old grocery packaging, labelling some of them with scraps of toilet paper. Can you imagine pulling off a heist of priceless watches, filling your apartment with books on how to take them apart, and then cobbling together an organisational system that relied on loo roll?
The subhead on this column is “Robin Swithinbank challenges the global watch business to cheer up”. Now Robin knows as well as anyone that reasons to be cheerful are thin on the ground - that’s addressed in his column. So I’m not accusing him of naivety. His point is that if watch brands are going to persuade customers to part with their cash - something they definitely need to work a bit harder at in 2025 than they’re used to - they might want to inspire a bit more joy. That might be a tall order given some of the omens currently emerging from Switzerland (WatchPro reported within days that all three major watchmaking conglomerates should expect double-digit falls in sales in their next annual reports) but it’s still going to be needed, if they can manage it.
The article, thankfully, isn’t aimed at his fellow pontificators like myself, but a few people have messaged me recently (I think it was around the middle of January when I reported on Purnell going out of business, suppliers in the Vallee de Joux forecasting doom and gloom and so on) to say that the Fourth Wheel was getting a little sombre. It’s not my intention - I started this newsletter to make bad puns and take the piss, among other noble goals - but honestly, when this is what I’m hearing from my contacts, I find it hard to put on a beaming smile and tell you all is well. Something has struck a nerve though - perhaps I recognised a curmudgeonly streak emerging when I found it genuinely difficult to say, at the end of last year, which mainstream brands I think are doing a great job. I don’t mind being a bit of a Cassandra from time to time - a journalist’s job is to report what’s really going on, after all - but I am mindful of the fact that for many people, watches are an escapist hobby. The mainstream news is pretty unremittingly terrible, and we look to our ‘special interests’ to get away from it all. So this is me pledging, I guess, to try and bring back a bit of that light-hearted nonsense from time to time. I’ll still tell you all the dire stories when I hear them, because you’re grown ups who can handle it, and someone needs to be talking about it - but I’m going to make sure at least once a month I publish something that should put a smile on your face. This is the newsletter that brought you horological drag names, watch limericks and the official ranking of moonphase facial expressions, after all. Let me see what else I can come up with.
That’s all for this week. As ever, thank you so much for reading. There are now two thousand of you picking this up every Friday, which is pretty good going for a side project. If you like what you see here, do consider a free trial subscription to get the full experience - and at the same time, take the few seconds if you can spare them to let me know what you think, either with a simple like or a comment. I take it all in.
Thanks,
Chris
Imagine my dismay :-) One day I’ll write a short answer to a short question, but today is not that day…
Can a pendulum swing have an apogee? I think we all know what I’m trying to say.
I mean without following the profession you’re critiquing - we can discuss the professionalism of journalists in general another time
I generalise, obviously, and don’t mean to cause offence - hence the quote marks.
Feel free to correct me!
To paraphrase and translate Warren Buffett, it’s far better to buy a wonderful watch at a fair price than a fair watch at a wonderful price.
Although what makes a wonderful watch varies by collector, I suspect most geezer watches will end in the latter category post-mortem
So, I just read Issue 39 on watch reviews. Excellent points!