The Five-Watch Collection

Eight years ago, we argued that five watches were all a man really needed. A lot has changed since then. Surprisingly, our answer hasn't.

How many watches does a man actually need?

The sensible answer is one. Choose it carefully, look after it, and a good watch can remain on your wrist for most of your adult life.

The watch enthusiast will give you a rather different answer. There is always another movement to discover, another piece of history, another complication, another dial, another watch you didn't know you needed until you saw it.

Watch collecting can be addictive. Once you get started, stopping can prove surprisingly difficult.

We proposed a compromise. We argued that five watches were enough.

Not five brands. Not five price points. And certainly not five watches chosen because somebody on the internet said they were good investments.

Five watches with five different jobs.

A Diver. An Aviator. A Driver. A Dress watch. And an Everyday watch.

Eight years and several thousand watches later, we still think we were right.

 

Diver

If you asked a room full of watch enthusiasts to choose one watch to wear for the rest of their lives, the Rolex Submariner would probably receive more than a few votes.

The Submariner ref. 5513 - made from 1962-1989. Crisp and timeless as if it had just left the factory yesterday.

There is a reason for that.

The Submariner began life as a tool. It was designed to go underwater, remain legible in poor conditions and allow a diver to keep track of elapsed time. Yet more than seventy years after its introduction, the basic formula has barely changed.

That tells us something.

A good dive watch is perhaps the ultimate mechanical all-rounder. It is tough, waterproof, easy to read and usually simple enough to work with almost anything you happen to be wearing.

And you certainly don't need a Rolex to get those qualities.

If you are starting a collection, buy a proper diver. It doesn't have to be expensive, but it does have to be honest. Look for excellent legibility, a dependable movement, a proper unidirectional bezel, a good sapphire crystal and enough water resistance to make the question largely academic.

We tend to regard 300 metres as a very useful benchmark. Almost nobody buying such a watch will ever take it anywhere near 300 metres below the surface, but that isn't really the point. It tells you something about the engineering and construction of the watch.

A dive watch is a tool first and jewellery second.

That's exactly why it deserves the first place in our collection.

Aviator

Next, look upwards. 

Ever since man began flying, watches have accompanied him.

And unlike many things subsequently invented by the watch industry, aviation watches originally existed because there was an actual problem to solve.

The Breitling Navtimer B01 Chronograph 41. The quintessential aviator's watch. All the numbers on the rotating bezel is actually part of its sliderule capability. If you know, you know. 

 

Pilots needed to know the time. They needed exceptional legibility. They needed to calculate elapsed time. Navigators needed precision. Long-distance flying introduced different time zones. Military aviation introduced an entirely different set of requirements.

The watches followed.

That is why the term aviator's watch covers such an extraordinary spectrum.

There is the beautifully simple Cartier Santos, created in the earliest days of powered flight. There are the enormous Beobachtungsuhren used by navigators during the Second World War. There is the Breitling Navitimer and its slide-rule bezel. There are GMT watches designed to make crossing time zones easier. And, stretching the definition beyond aviation and into space, there is the Omega Speedmaster.

They look completely different because they were designed to do completely different jobs.

That is what makes aviation watches fascinating.

Your representative doesn't necessarily need a chronograph, GMT hand or rotating calculation bezel. A beautifully legible military-style watch with nothing more complicated than three hands can fulfil the brief perfectly.

What matters is that it comes from that wonderful tradition of watches designed around navigation, legibility and purpose.

Every collection deserves one.

 

Driver

Having equipped ourselves for the sea and the sky, we arrive on the racetrack.

Motorsport and watches have been inseparable for generations, and for one very obvious reason: time matters.

The Heuer Monaco and the man that made it iconic. Steve McQueen chose to wear the Monaco in the film: Le Mans from 1971.

 

A tenth of a second can separate first from second. A lap time tells a driver whether something is working. Speed, distance and elapsed time are fundamental to the sport.

Enter the chronograph.

Rolex has the Daytona. TAG Heuer has the Carrera and Monaco. Omega has the Speedmaster. Zenith has the El Primero. There are countless others.

But forget the names for a moment.

The important thing is the complication itself.

You may never time a lap at Le Mans. That doesn't make a chronograph pointless. Quite the opposite. Of all the traditional watch complications, the stopwatch remains one of the easiest to understand and one of the few you can genuinely find a reason to use.

Start it. Stop it. Reset it.

Time a journey. Time a meeting. Time something in the oven. Time your morning run. Or, if you are fortunate enough to find yourself on a racetrack, time a lap.

There is also something wonderfully mechanical about interacting with a chronograph. Those pushers invite you to use the watch rather than simply look at it.

For our third watch, therefore, we want a chronograph.

Calling it a Driver simply gives us a better excuse.

Dress

This is probably the category that has changed most since we first wrote this article.

Seven years ago, we described the dress watch as something reserved for those few occasions when everything else simply wouldn't do.

We're not sure that is true anymore.

 

The new Tudor Monarch. Once in a while a watch so spectacular appears that you forget to breathe. The Monarch is that kind of a watch and although it is slightly larger than your traditional dress watch, we would pick this for a more dressy occasion.

 

Men wear dive watches with dinner jackets. Vintage watches are worn with jeans. The rules surrounding formal dress have relaxed enormously.

But elegance hasn't disappeared.

A proper dress watch remains a wonderful thing precisely because it doesn't try too hard.

No enormous bezel. No collection of complications you don't need. No 46mm case fighting with your shirt cuff for territory.

Just a beautifully proportioned watch with a clean dial, a relatively slim case and very little shouting for attention.

Traditionally that meant something around 34–36mm, often in gold, frequently hand-wound and almost invariably worn on leather. Today the definition can be broader, but the underlying principle remains the same.

Discretion.

And this is also the category where provenance can matter more than specification.

A modest Omega inherited from your father may mean infinitely more than a watch costing twenty times as much. A watch worn by your grandfather doesn't require a ceramic bezel, helium escape valve or five-year warranty to be important.

Its scratches are part of the specification.

Perhaps that is the real purpose of the dress watch in a collection.

The other four tell people something about you.

This one might tell you something about where you came from.

Everyday

And finally we arrive at the most important watch of the five.

The one you actually wear.

An everyday watch has an extraordinarily difficult job because it needs to do almost everything without appearing to do very much at all.

 

Our very own Roam E07/B GMT is the answer to a question Hans was often asked: If you were to wear one particular watch every day for the rest of your life - what would it look like? 

It needs to work in the office. On holiday. On a walk. At dinner. On an aircraft. In the garden. With a T-shirt. With a jacket.

You shouldn't have to think about it.

Perhaps it has a GMT hand because you travel. Perhaps it has a date because you actually use one. Perhaps it is automatic. Perhaps it is quartz.

None of those things really defines it.

What defines the everyday watch is that when you reach for a watch in the morning, this is the one you instinctively pick.

It should be comfortable. Dependable. Legible. Sensibly sized. Tough enough for normal life and understated enough that it doesn't announce your arrival from the other side of the room.

Eight years ago, we wrote something about the everyday watch that we still believe: The everyday watch shows who you are and what you stand for, but it never upstages you.

If anything, we believe that more strongly today. There are enough things in the world shouting for attention. Your watch doesn't have to be one of them.

So, are five watches really enough? Of course they are.

In truth, one is enough.

Equally, nobody who has fallen properly in love with watches is particularly likely to stop at five.

But if we had to build a collection from scratch today, knowing what we know after years of designing, selling, servicing and wearing watches, we would still begin exactly where we did back then.

A Diver for the water. An Aviator for the sky. A Driver to measure elapsed time. A Dress watch for those occasions when restraint matters.

And an Everyday watch for everything else.

After that? Buy whatever makes you smile. Because once those five jobs have been filled, need has very little to do with it.

Five watches. Five jobs. Everything else is collecting.