Unlike the blink-and-you-miss-it product cycle of the fashion world, the high-end watch industry takes its time with a trend. That explains why, after at least five years of sustained interest (and sky-high prices), the craze for sporty steel watches with ’60s and ’70s heritage continues unabated.
The mania — some have called it madness — applies to both new and old watches, and is especially pronounced in a handful of models made by Rolex, Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe. Many point to October 2017, when Phillips auctioned off Paul Newman’s Rolex Daytona for $17.8 million (buyer’s premium included), as the start of the frenzy. But nothing compares to what has happened to the sport in the last two years.
Consider the current market value of the Tiffany Blue dial version of the coveted Ref. 5711 Nautilus, introduced in December for a retail price of $52,635. According to various dealers, the steel model is now rumored to be worth $3 million in backchannels, not to mention the $6.2 million a buyer paid for a special edition auctioned off for charity at Phillips New York in December.
The hype is causing a growing number of collectors to wonder: Has the shark jumped the category? (And if so, is there another type of watch ready to replace it?) Or will steel sports watches maintain their hegemony over the luxury watch business?
The answer can be all of the above.
“There’s not necessarily a slowdown in top-tier stainless steel sports models, but there is room for others to emerge,” said James Lamdin, director of vintage and pre-owned watches at the New York-based Swiss Watches Group. a recent phone interview. “I’m already seeing it and it’s going to get bigger and bigger: smaller, slimmer precious metal watches with a more avant-garde design language, both vintage and contemporary.”
Keith Davis, Christie’s head of watches in the Americas, pointed to the house’s live sale in November in Geneva, where all 119 lots were sold. “The fact is that everything went exceptionally well,” he said, also in a telephone interview. “There are spikes in value in areas that we didn’t see five years ago. It is not about what follows; It is an extension”.
While newcomers to cash-rich watches continue to clamor for steel classics, seasoned collectors looking for their next fix look for “what’s hard to come by, what’s in limited production, what’s likely to increase in value.” said Edouard Meylan, CEO. of the independent brand H. Moser & Cie.
A handful of independent brands, including Moser, De Bethune, MB&F, Urwerk, Laurent Ferrier and Voutilainen, are benefiting from the phenomenon Mr. Meylan described, a trend that has been well documented.
Less familiar is the attention some collectors are now devoting to dress watches, an industry term for watches designed to be worn with suits and on formal occasions. Interest is concentrated on the dress styles made from the late 1980s to the early 2000s by the watchmakers who laid the foundation for today’s independent scene, including Daniel Roth, Roger Dubuis, Michel Parmigiani and Franck Muller.
In July, A Collected Man, a London-based website for rare watches and other collectibles founded by Silas Walton, published an essay on “the rise of neo-vintage watches,” referring to non-vintage watches. all new, not quite vintage and have long been “discarded by collectors, precisely because they fell through the cracks”.
“People recognize that these watches were made at a time when the watch industry was reinventing itself,” Walton said in a recent video call. “They were made to an extremely high level of quality; the design was very good in many cases. But once they went out of style, they disappeared into the drawers and there wasn’t enough activity to move the market to the age of Instagram and online platforms like ours, and suddenly people rediscovered them.”
Mr. Walton was referring to a Roger Dubuis chronograph from the late 1990s certified with the prestigious Poinçon de Genève seal of quality, made “by the best case makers, with the best movement, the best finish, and yet , it sells for $20,000,” he said. “How does this make sense?”
Equally undervalued, according to Aurel Bacs, the Geneva-based auctioneer who runs Phillips’ watch department, are “cool men’s watches,” which he described as slim 35-millimeter styles from the 1960s and 1970s from brands like Audemars. Piguet, Piaget, Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin.
“You couldn’t give them away a few years ago because they didn’t give you that status,” he said.
Sean Song, a rare and vintage watch dealer based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, said Jaeger-LeCoultre’s famous Reverso model suffered from a similar problem, making it “hugely undervalued”.
It has “everything to make it a collector’s dream, with enough variety, complications, and strong heritage and design,” Song wrote in an email. “I especially like the Reverso Chronograph Retrograde 270.2.69. Limited to 500 pieces and with a beautiful hand-wound caliber, I don’t see why it’s not up there with the early Dubuis and Daniel Roth.”
The Reverso’s rich Art Deco-era history aside, the rectangular model may also be riding a wave of new interest in what are known as “shaped watches”—essentially any watch that isn’t round. Cartier dominates the space because of its history of making watches with distinctive silhouettes (consider the elegantly elongated Tank, the bathtub-shaped Baignoire and the dented Crash), but industry watchers are seeing all kinds of shaped watches, from Patek’s marvelous 1968 Golden Ellipse to Franck Muller’s barrel-shaped perpetual calendars, they increase in value.
Artemy Lechbinskiy, CEO of Ineichen Auctioneers in Zurich, explained the growing interest in offbeat watches in general as a reflection of market heat.
“Market prices for sporty steel models are already so high that 90 percent of collectors and end customers are not willing to pay this amount,” he said in a recent video call. “If you have liquidity and are still passionate about it, you need to invest in something.”
Other once-mocked styles that have made a strong comeback of late: gold and two-tone wristwatches, which many observers say have to do with a shortage of the most coveted steel models.
“We see a huge demand for gold watches that is difficult to meet,” said Ruediger Albers, president of Wempe Jewelers on Fifth Avenue in New York City. “People love certain models and if they can’t get it in steel, they think they’ll indulge in gold, only to find that that’s hard to get too.”
The same phenomenon is also generating interest in lesser-known steel models with great design history and cult appeal, such as IWC Schaffhausen’s 1955 Ingenieur, Girard-Perregaux’s 1975 Laureato, and the 222 model introduced by Vacheron Constantin in 1977. , the predecessor to the brand’s long-running Overseas sports watch collection.
In a recent video call, Gabe Reilly, co-founder of Collective Horology, a California-based collectors’ group, looked at the market trends of the past two years — key model shortages, skyrocketing prices, cynicism — and sighed.
“It’s really demotivating to find out you can’t buy the watch you want,” he said. “But there’s a silver lining: It’s making people look elsewhere.”
Mr. Reilly spoke from personal experience. “I wear a Girard-Perregaux Laureato,” he said. “Probably not a brand I would have looked at if it wasn’t impossible for me to get an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Chronograph. But I found out which is a better watch for me.
“We see other people discover steel sports watches from independent brands, like Czapek,” he added. “And it’s also sending people in the direction of cheap and cheerful, taking comfort in micro-brands and enjoying collecting things at a significantly lower price. It’s like a particle collider: I see that the interest goes everywhere.
Source: www.nytimes.com