The trend toward dress watches , and smaller ones in particular, has been so powerful that even Rolex sports watches are dropping in value as prices for the dressy 36 mm Day-Date skyrocket . It’s not as if the solid-gold dress watch ever really fell off the horological map, of course, but there’s no denying that today’s watch enthusiast is more interested in a classic dress watch than in the past decade. Part of the explanation could be that crypto-bros and pandemic collectors have left the scene , but there has also been a surge of interest in quiet luxury in the past couple of years.
The sartorial zeitgeist, it seems, is in transition. For those of us who prefer simple, time-only dress watches, the moment feels like a needed correction. I personally own and wear a bevy of small vintage Vacheron Constnatin time-only watches from what many call the golden era of Swiss watchmaking—the 1940s through the 1960s—and they serve me well every day.
If I, and many of my aspiring sartorial cohorts, have a complaint about modern dress watches, it is that they’re too big. Even the modern Patek Philippe Calatrava reference 5227 at 37 mm—though among the most gorgeous solid-gold dress watches currently produced—is borderline indiscrete. One watch dealer told me that he advised his client to stop wearing his 5772 in Manhattan, for hear he’d get mugged.
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