8.5/The Lived Worlds/Fashion and Material Culture

Watches and Class Signals

The Watch Nobody Priced

The objects doing that appraising, on the magazine’s own floor, were concrete. An inherited dress watch the width of a dime — its thin gold case worn smooth at the back from decades first on a father’s wrist and then on a daughter’s — drew no comment from anyone who saw it, and needed none. A heavier watch two desks over, a steel Rolex bought new within the year, its bracelet catching light every time its owner reached for a telephone, drew the private markdown described above. The watch that would actually have told a person the truth about a time zone she had just left belonged to neither reading. It sat on a foreign correspondent’s wrist a continent away: a rectangular block of black resin, bought for something under fifty dollars, built to survive conditions that ruin a thin gold dress watch or a steel bracelet within a week.

Which of the first two watches counted as pedigree and which counted as effort had already been settled by the same recession-era logic that scored an unlabeled sheath over a labeled one. What that reading left alone was the objects themselves: four watches, worn on the same masthead in the same years, built by four different logics to do four different jobs, only one of which had anything to do with being seen.

The Currency of Not Trying

Cartier’s Tank, a flat rectangular case on a leather strap designed in the years around the First World War, was old money’s default because it required no explanation. Its accessible line, Les Must de Cartier, entered the market in 1977 — a response to the same crisis that was flooding watch counters everywhere with cheap, accurate Japanese quartz movements — built in vermeil, silver gilded in gold, so that it looked, to any eye but a jeweler’s, identical to the solid-gold original it stood in for at a fraction of the cost.² Worn without a box, without a receipt, without any gesture toward its own value, a Tank on an old-money wrist required no defense of its own worth; the absence of any defense was the point.

The Rolex — a Datejust with its cyclops-magnified date window, a Submariner with its diver’s bezel and oyster case — required the opposite. Both were built as instruments first, self-winding, water-resistant, engineered to a standard a wearer could point to and explain. That was precisely what read as wrong to the room: a watch a person could describe the merits of was a watch its owner had researched and then bought, and buying, on that floor in that decade, was the one transaction pedigree was supposed to make unnecessary. The distinction had nothing to do with the two watches’ actual prices, which could land at the same number. It had to do with which watch could explain itself and which could not, and did not need to. A Submariner’s deep-diving water resistance meant nothing to the wrist that wore it in an office on Madison Avenue, and that was itself part of the point: over-engineering as its own kind of pedigree, proof that the object, unlike the man wearing it, was built for depths he had no plans to visit.

Three floors down and a few blocks over, on the finance side of the same recession, the same object told a third, faster story. New money ran on the December bonus check, the single date on the calendar that determined what got bought, renovated, or upgraded for the following twelve months, and a Rolex purchased in the flush weeks after the check cleared read as exactly what it was: this year’s money, spent on this year’s object, timed to a cycle the old-money wrist never had to observe. The magazine’s own senior editors moved in the same buildings as that money without belonging to it, which was part of what let them read it so precisely — they could price a January Rolex to the week without ever having received a bonus themselves.

The Watch Built to Cost Nothing

A third watch on the same floor answered to neither logic. Founded in Switzerland in 1983 by Ernst Thomke, Elmar Mock, and Jacques Müller, Swatch built its case and movement as a single sealed plastic unit, requiring a fraction of the parts and the assembly labor a conventional mechanical watch needed, and sold the result as exactly what its name proposed: a second watch, casual and replaceable, worn alongside a real watch rather than instead of one.³ Owning three or four, in different colors, for different moods, was not carelessness. It was the entire point — a Swatch that cracked or fell out of a season’s favor cost too little to mourn, which made it, to the small number of readers positioned to notice, its own kind of unconcern. The Tank achieved indifference to money by never having had to think about it. The Swatch achieved the identical appearance by being cheap enough that the question never arose.

A vintage Omega, bought secondhand from a dealer or an estate sale rather than a boutique, worked the same inversion from the opposite direction. Decades old, its dial faded and its case already scuffed by a stranger’s years of wear before it reached a new owner’s wrist, it was not under warranty and told no one what it had cost — only that its owner had known where to look for it. On a floor that traded, above everything else, in the claim to know a thing before the general public did, that particular knowledge outranked whatever a Rolex bracelet could announce merely by catching the light.

What a Watch Was Actually For

None of this reading reached the fourth watch, because the fourth watch was never on the floor to be read. A foreign correspondent filing from a checkpoint, a border crossing, or a hotel running on generator power needed an object built to keep working through conditions no editorial floor’s climate control ever tested, and by November 1989 the object that did that reliably and without ceremony was the Casio G-Shock DW-5600C-1, in production since June 1987.

An automatic Seiko 5 offered the same reliability dressed for a meeting rather than a filing queue: caliber 7009, a slim thirty-six-millimeter case, and a day-date window whose day wheel could be set to alternate in and out of English depending on the market a given watch had been sold into — a small mechanical bilingualism useful to a correspondent working copy between two languages.⁵ The Timex Ironman Triathlon, on the market since 1986, was the third plausible choice and the most American of the three: an unglamorous, mass-produced sports watch, round-cased and grey, cheap enough that an Arkansas governor wore his into the presidency and kept wearing it through the start of a first term.

The comparison to the watch world the Rolex belonged to had already been made explicitly, and in print, within the period — the Washington Post line and the Omega advertisements of March 1993, cited above. The joke worked only because both sides of it were legible to the same reader: a hundred-dollar difference in retail price produced no punchline; a difference in what the watch was for did.

A correspondent’s kit committed to neither the floor’s old-money logic nor its inverse. The Swatch, built to be seen and replaced, was wrong for the same reason a Rolex was wrong: a body pinned down in a filing queue had no use for a watch designed to say anything about its owner at all, and a bought steel case belonged on a wrist that was trying to be read, not on one trying to survive.

None of the three, that November, was the cheapest digital Casio made. The F-91W, a slim plastic model, had entered production earlier the same year and, at introduction, sold for about twenty dollars — less even than the G-Shock.⁶ A watch’s standing in a filing queue was built the same way a stringer’s was: by a record, not a release date. In November 1989 the F-91W was still new enough that most watch counters carried little or no stock of it, while the G-Shock, two years into production, was already carried by correspondents who trusted it.