Vintage Watches Are Bullshit

Note: I originally wrote this as an “Audicle” for The Real Time Show. If you have some time, please do check this episode out, as well as the show’s growing catalog!

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One of the bigger stories coming out of the watch world recently involves an auctioned 1957 Omega CK2915, an historically important model for one of the industry’s most well-known brands. The auction results went from jubilant event to horror-show after the item was found to be a “Franken-watch”, made up of various original and trafficked parts.

Adding dynamite to this explosive news is that not only was the winning bidder Omega itself, but also that the affair has embroiled some of its highest-level employees, Phillips, one of the largest and best-known luxury auction houses, and Aurel Bacs, arguably the most well-known auctioneer in the vintage watch space.

This is an ongoing cluster-pile so I won’t speculate on what did or did not happen, but to be honest, I don’t care to find out more (though if you do, check out episode 61 where Rob and Alon give you the full rundown).

In fact, for years my stance has been that I should pay just enough attention to what happens in the vintage market to remind myself that there is absolutely no need to pay much attention to the vintage market, or pretty much any so-called “vintage” watch.

I’m very proud of the “Resident Provocateur” nickname bestowed on me by my TRTS colleagues, so let me just be blunt:

Vintage watches are bullshit.

I do believe this to be nearly totally true, but as with everything there are some exceptions and disclaimers to mention:

• Firstly, as much as I’ll try and build out solid arguments, this is my opinion only, so if you disagree, please feel free to contact The Real Time Show via the usual channels to tell us why. 

• Secondly, everyone is free to love what they love, so if vintage watches are where your timepiece budget goes, good for you, I’m truly happy that they make you happy, and I’d be genuinely thrilled to share in your enthusiasm if we ever speak at a meetup.

• Thirdly, I’m clearly not talking about truly historically significant watches, those that are essentially museum pieces. For instance, I’d be in awe faced with something made by Breguet himself. 

• Lastly, vintage watches one inherits are clearly excluded from this discussion because sentimental value trumps the thread that’s going to run through this piece (and so many other distasteful aspects of this hobby), which is money.

Indeed, going back to this Omega, the final sour-cherry-on-top of this soggy cake is that whereas the watch had a pre-auction estimate of about 100,000 Swiss francs, it ended up hammering for well over 3,000,000 Swiss francs, making it the most expensive Omega ever sold at auction.

Smell that?

That markup?

That’s a big old pile of bullshit my TRTS friends, and it shows up in the price of just about every vintage watch I’ve seen appear on a watch blog.

Let’s start with the word itself, “vintage”.

I’m very proud of this meme I made!

This word is very distinct from “used” or “second-hand”, because while those are objective descriptors and I very much do take part in the buying and selling of pre-owned watches, “vintage” is meant to evoke goods that are lovingly taken care of, from a time when things were just made better. 

Oftentimes though, that word is doing a lot of heavy lifting, standing in as a euphemism for “old” at best, and “damaged” at worst. 

Put another way, would you think of referring to the hypothetical Breguet from earlier as “vintage”? It doesn’t really seem to do it justice, does it? On the flipside, how many times have you seen a tired object - anything really - on eBay with “vintage” slapped haphazardly on the description?

Sometimes the word fits, sure, but other times it’s just junk, and let’s be honest, the watch world, for all the amazing creations it births, still presents a lot of junk and bullshit just by virtue of how long it’s existed.

Closely associated with “vintage” are other terms such as “patina”, “tropical dial”, “spider dial” (among others) which have been used to put a positive spin on what is often degradation, all to make you feel good about spending a lot of money on a timepiece that is more fragile than a MoonSwatch.

On that point, I understand that sellers of vintage watches need to lay it on thick, because any watch marketed as such is objectively inferior in performance to what you can buy today.

In 2023, essentially any random microbrand will offer a better product than what you’ll find at the auction blocks: water resistance you can trust, tight, unidirectional bezel actions, milled cases, and perhaps even ceramic cases, dials and bezels that are basically impervious to the effects of time.

Also, let’s not forget that whereas many of the large brands today are highly vertically integrated, the mid-century watch industry relied heavily on suppliers who would sell their various ebauches and parts to multiple brands. 

So, the vintage watch that is being sold to you as “rare” was likely not only manufactured industrially, but also probably does share quite a few similarities with other watches that are going for next to nothing, in effect what they’re intrinsically worth, on eBay because they happen to have a different name on the dial.

And yet, these tinselly, beat up things go for thousands online and sometimes millions at auction.

“But David, it’s supply and demand and the desire to have something exclusive”.

When prices go up, it’s because there is more demand than there is supply, ok, but the path to that imbalance matters. 

On one hand, perhaps supply is inadequate because enough quantity can’t be manufactured to meet demand (that’s sort of what’s happening with Rolex). On the other hand, you have a fixed quantity of goods - in this case watches that are out of production - and the only way to put upwards pressure on pricing is to juice interest in demand, past that fixed supply.

Take it from Aurel Bacs himself, whose thought process was described in a 2019 profile by GQ :

“To Bacs's mind, a watch is not a commodity; it's kind of a living object, able to tell a story if the owner is careful to listen. Which is why, in his vernacular, a watch is never “expensive.” No, it is instead valuable, or precious, or sometimes costly. “Expensive is something that is not worth the price tag.”

In the watch community we are quick to call “bullshit” on brands’ marketing efforts, but how is the above extract anything other than a marketing strategy?

The difference between marketing as a cost component of a modern watch is that you can strip away the “fluff” and evaluate it objectively; if you choose to purchase it you’re still left with a highly functional object that will do what it was intended to and that you can sell on for some transparent, residual value. 

With most vintage watches, once you strip away that marketing, what exactly are you left with, other than, indeed, a “commodity”, and a worn out one at that.

In fact, whereas your hypothetical modern watch trades on its own merits on a robust and again, transparent, secondary market, the retained value of your vintage watch relies solely on the ongoing perception that it is still worth something if and when you decide to sell it.

Sounds kind of sketchy when you hear it that way, doesn’t it?

It’s no wonder the market for vintage watches is such a viper’s nest: the sellers and the auction houses have every incentive to boost sales prices, collect as much money as they can, and the buyers are left holding the bag in the end.

In a twisted way, I think this state of affairs is why even though the Omega debacle will probably be presented as an aberration, my feeling (again, just my feeling, I have no hard data to back this hypothesis) is that this type of mishap is far more prevalent than we realize because buyers will rarely be willing to admit openly they’ve been had.

All of us have at some point felt like we have been played, so you don’t need me to tell you it’s an embarrassing feeling. But what about when large amounts of money are at stake? And what about when the people with these large amounts of money feel, rightly or wrongly, that they earned their lot in life because of their ability to make excellent decisions and successfully detect bullshit?

For every case of John Mayer suing his former friend for selling him fake vintage watches, my inclination is to believe there are perhaps dozens of other ones that are either swept under the rug, or whose victims internalize the embarrassment, and the rotten-ness of the vintage watch market is allowed to continue.

I left the concept of “story” to the end of this Audicle because it’s the foundation for some of the stratospheric valuations you see in the vintage space, or just any vintage watch generally, and it’s the argument I actually find the least compelling.

I’ve never understood the desire to own a watch because someone found its history more interesting than the future - their own - that they might create with their own, newer acquisition.

Again, because vintage watches are so fragile, you are very limited in just how much of a literal mark you can make, and you end up not paying for the use of the watch itself, but rather almost solely for the questionably notable story the auction house or solo dealer told you to justify their asking price.

I can’t wrap my head around that, and furthermore I’m under no illusions that wearing a watch owned by someone more interesting than me, by extension, makes me more interesting. 

As much as I dislike the Tiffany x Patek Philippe Nautilus (which you can hear about in the associated Real Time Show Audicle and discussion), in the hypothetical case I were to buy Jay-Z’s example, I would still not be Jay-Z. Actually, picturing myself in a setting where I couldn’t shut up about wearing Jay-Z’s watch would realistically make me quite insufferable.

That’s a frivolous example, but vintage watches trading on their military heritage are a sore point for me as well. I respect those who follow that vocation and its hardships, but I did not serve and would feel like a poser at just the thought of putting money down for such a watch, let alone one whose value may be derived from situations that could very well have been terrifying for the original owner.

Maybe I’m just not rich enough to get it. Maybe if I could spend several months’ rent like I spend a couple of euros to buy my baguette on a watch that can’t handle a dewy morning without fogging up l, I wouldn’t have felt the need to get my thoughts out.

But then I think that, big picture, there are some implications to all this bullshit. The first is that the heavy reliance on “stories” (again I use that term in quotes, and very loosely) only encourages some of the worst behaviors and trends we’ve seen emerge in the last few years, which I discussed in the Tiffany x Patek Philippe series.

The second is that the heavy focus on vintage has arguably set watch design back a decade, if not more. I appreciate vintage re-issues because they allow buyers to have the best of both worlds, truly vintage design with modern performance, but I’d love to see a bit more balance in terms of risk-taking, and a lot less bullshit.