The Price of Pretending

“Could you have a look at my Dad’s Rolex?”

It is one of those questions watch people hear from time to time.

A close friend of my wife had recently lost her father. Like many men of his generation, he had rarely been seen without his Rolex Datejust. The watch had become part of how the family remembered him.

Before deciding whether to keep it or sell it, she wanted to know what it was worth.

I placed the watch on my bench and began the inspection.

At first glance, nothing seemed particularly unusual. The dial looked convincing enough. The case had the familiar proportions. The bracelet showed the gentle stretch you might expect from a watch worn for many years.

Then I removed the bracelet.

Rolex traditionally places the model and serial numbers between the lugs, beneath the end links. On this watch, there was nothing.

I put the case under the microscope.

Still nothing. Not even the faintest trace of a number.

That was when I became concerned.

Then I removed the caseback.

Instead of the Rolex movement I expected to find, I was looking at a cheap generic Chinese movement with an unfamiliar name printed on the rotor.

It had absolutely no business being inside a Rolex.

The watch was fake.

And the disappointment had very little to do with money.

The uncomfortable part was not knowing the story behind it. Had her father known? Had he been deceived himself? Had he bought it many years earlier believing he had found an extraordinary bargain?

We would probably never know.

But the watch stayed in my mind.

Fake watches are nothing new

Counterfeit watches have been around for as long as I can remember.

Back in the wonderful 1980s, it sometimes seemed that everyone knew someone with a Rolex - although rather fewer of those watches had ever been anywhere near Geneva.

Even as teenagers, most of us had never handled a genuine Rolex, yet somehow the bad copies were easy to recognise.

The bracelet felt flimsy. The dial printing lacked refinement. The second hand ticked around the dial instead of moving smoothly. Everything felt slightly wrong.

Today, the situation is very different.

Some counterfeit watches are remarkably convincing. Cases, dials, bracelets and even movements can be copied closely enough that identifying a fake may require considerably more than a quick glance across a table.

That raises a more interesting question than simply how to spot one.

Why do people knowingly buy them?

One statistic I came across while researching this article surprised me. According to OECD research, a significant proportion of counterfeit watch buyers know perfectly well that they are buying a fake.

They are not necessarily being deceived.

They are choosing it.

That changes the discussion.

Why buy something you know isn't the real thing?

Over the years I have heard most of the explanations.

“I own the genuine one. I just don’t want to wear it every day.”

So the real watch stays safely at home while the replica takes the risks.

I understand the practical logic, although I have always found the idea slightly strange. If the pleasure of owning the watch comes partly from wearing it, keeping the genuine article in a safe seems to remove something important from the experience.

Then there is:

“I don’t want to get mugged over a Rolex.”

Again, understandable in principle. But if the replica is convincing enough to fool everyone else, it is unlikely to provide much protection from someone who thinks you are wearing the genuine thing.

Another familiar argument is:

“I refuse to pay Rolex prices.”

That one is easier to understand.

Fine watches can be extremely expensive, and not everyone believes those prices represent good value. There is nothing wrong with deciding that £10,000 or £15,000 is simply too much to spend on a watch.

But there is an enormous gap between refusing to pay Rolex prices and wearing something with Rolex written on the dial that Rolex never made.

And then there is perhaps the most revealing argument of all:

“No one can tell the difference anyway.”

Perhaps not.

But you can.

What are we really buying?

That is where counterfeit watches become interesting to me.

A watch is a remarkably simple object in one sense. It tells the time. Yet we have always attached much more meaning to watches than their basic function requires.

They can mark an achievement, an anniversary, a career, a journey or a person.

Some also communicate status.

There is nothing particularly new or shameful about that. Humans have used clothes, cars, houses, jewellery and countless other objects to express who we are for centuries.

Watches are part of the same language.

The difficulty arises when the object begins telling a story that is not really ours.

If what we value most about a watch is the name printed on the dial, then perhaps a convincing copy can appear to deliver much of the same effect for a fraction of the price.

But if the value lies in owning the genuine object - in its engineering, provenance, history and eventually the memories we attach to it - the imitation can never quite provide the same thing.

It can reproduce the appearance.

It cannot reproduce the story.

The genuine alternative

There is another part of the counterfeit discussion that I think is often overlooked.

Someone buying a £300 fake Rolex was probably never about to walk into an authorised dealer and spend £12,000 on a genuine one.

So the choice is not always between a counterfeit Rolex and a genuine Rolex.

Quite often, the real choice is between a fake expensive watch and a genuine affordable watch.

And that changes things considerably.

There are excellent watches available at almost every sensible price point. Seiko, Citizen, Tissot, Certina and many smaller independent brands make watches with genuine engineering, genuine histories and identities of their own.

A £300 watch does not need to pretend to be a £15,000 watch to be worth owning.

In fact, I would argue that the opposite is often true.

There is something satisfying about an object that knows exactly what it is.

The watches that become valuable

That brings me back to the Rolex on my bench.

The saddest part was not discovering that the watch had little monetary value.

It was imagining the conversation we could never have.

Had he known?

Had someone fooled him?

Did he buy it on holiday decades ago and spend the rest of his life believing he owned the genuine article?

Or had he simply liked the watch and never cared very much either way?

Perhaps that last possibility is worth remembering too. We cannot always know what a watch meant to someone else.

But the experience reminded me of something I have gradually come to believe.

The most valuable watch you will ever own is rarely the most expensive one.

It might be a battered Seiko worn while building a business.

A military watch carried through a deployment.

A modest gold watch presented on retirement.

My own father’s old Omega Seamaster.

These watches matter because of what happened while they were being worn.

Their scratches belong to someone. Their stories belong somewhere.

They do not need borrowed prestige because they have acquired something better: a history of their own.

An honest kind of watch

Perhaps that is why I remain so fond of simple mechanical field watches.

The Fly E03/P is a 38mm hand-wound watch inspired by the British military W10 tradition. No battery, no charging and no borrowed identity. You wind it, put it on and wear it.

The Enoksen Fly E03/P

It isn't trying to be something else. It doesn't need to be.

Its appeal lies in its proportions, its legibility and the simple mechanical relationship between the watch and the person wearing it.

Whether the E03/P becomes the watch you keep reaching for or one that finds its place for just the right occasions, what it comes to mean will be shaped by the life you live while wearing it.

Because in the end, the best story a watch can tell is not the one printed on its dial.

It is yours.