The Fourth Wheel, Issue 55

Should we boycott watches from Russia?

Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that this week is getting stuck into some Big Ethical Debates. Someone around here should be doing it, after all. I apologise in advance: this is not a rollicking romp through watch culture with bags of sarcastic comments and bad puns. I’ll bring you some of that in the next two weeks. But I set this newsletter up as a way to address any subject I fancied, and it turns out that right now, that’s the moral dilemma of doing business with Russia, and how the big bad world intrudes on our horological safe space.

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A couple of weeks ago, I singled out for praise a collaboration between Amr Sindi, aka The Horophile, and Russian watchmaker Raketa. I didn’t think too hard before I did so; my reaction was to the design first and foremost and - total candour for you - it was one of the last things I did before putting a lid on that issue and pressing send.

A fellow journalist, who had his moral compass to hand, asked whether I thought working with a Russian watch company was acceptable in the current time. I started to dash off a reply for last week’s issue, but you all deserve better than that. These are grown-up questions and deserve substantial answers.

The watch in question. I still think it looks cool, but that’s not why we’re here…

I contacted Sindi - who had already answered a few similar questions on Instagram in public - to talk it through with him, and having exchanged a few messages, have a better understanding of the situation.

Before we get to that, a wider note on ethics and politics in the watch world. Most consumers of watches view it as a passion, a hobby - often an escape from ‘the real world’ - and it’s a guarantee that as soon as you start opining on troublesome subjects a vocal minority will arrive to tell you to ‘keep the politics out of watches’. At best, that’s a reductive response: at worst, it preaches actively turning a blind eye to issues we should all be happier to confront.

Problematic issues aren’t hard to find in the luxury business. They aren’t hard to find in the world at large, and that’s part of the problem - we want our pastimes to offer some respite from a world of abuse, corruption, scandal and disaster. And at their best, they should be. You should be able to enjoy sport without worrying about racism, or gambling, or the reputation-laundering of petro-states. You should be able to enjoy art without weighing the power dynamic and institutional bias that led the artist in question to secure gallery space, or the origins of the money that paid for the space. You should be able to watch your favourite movies without fretting that the leading man might be a dreadful sex pest. It’s important that we can all occasionally switch off that part of our brain and enjoy entertainment for what it is - but it also matters that somewhere, these questions are being asked, these injustices exposed, these systems challenged.

I am not a crusading journalist with nothing to lose.¹ But just off the cuff: gold, diamonds, supply chain transparency, sustainability, the authentication of extremely valuable vintage watches, diversity… these are all problem conversations for the watch industry. To which we can now add: international geopolitics and the perils of doing business with a pariah state.