Since the start of the pandemic, time has warped into a maddening Möbius loop: we lost track of time, made up for lost time, and then time became a luxury again as we returned to ‘normal’ life. In the ever-omniscient world of fashion too, it felt like designers and consumers alike were stuck in a Gabriel García Marquez novel. One moment TikTok influencers were cycling though every trend of the early 2000s at blitz speed, the next fashion houses were proclaiming the apocalypse had arrived, and then before we knew it, 2022 was declared the year of the rot.
Fast-forward to 2023 and it appears the it-women of our digital era — Bella Hadid, Dua Lipa, Kendall Jenner etc. — have found a way to stay grounded amidst the worldly chaos: wearing an analogue wristwatch to, literally, keep track of time. Even Shakira kicked off the year in a timely fashion: using watches to dignify her self-worth by declaring in her internet-breaking track “Bzrp Music Sessions #53” that her ex-boyfriend “traded a Rolex (her) for a Casio (his new girlfriend).” Though Casio walk away the real winners here, with the verse reportedly earning them $70 million in Media Impact Value.
Conveniently, a new type of influencer has slid into our social media feeds: ‘non-collector’ watch aficionados like Brynn Wallner of the Instagram account and blog Dimepiece. During her time working at Sotheby’s, Wallner remarked that women were so often excluded from the world of watches. An image of Rihanna at the airport in a Palace tracksuit and a gold Patek Philippe Nautilus convinced her that there was a space to challenge the “boy’s club energy” associated with watches, and to make the world accessible to “girls, gays, and theys” — and basically anyone else interested in keeping time without a million-dollar budget. Through her social media account, which “connects the dots between watches, lifestyle, fashion, and culture”, analogue timekeeping is artfully positioned as a practical-yet-stylish antidote to the glum state of world affairs.
Perhaps through Dimepiece’s focus, Wallner is also turning back time to gently correct the strange gendering of watches as masculine. The first recorded bracelet timepiece was created by Abraham-Louis Breguet (founder of the Swiss luxury watch house Breguet) in 1810 for Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples. In fact, “wristlets,” were worn almost exclusively by women for the first 100 years of their existence as they were dismissed by men as silly costume jewellery (that is, until they found themselves in the trenches during World War I and realised a wristwatch was far more convenient than a pocket watch).
As Sotheby’s Private Sales Director and fine jewellery specialist Joanna Yuan Gong points out in an interview on Dimepiece, the wristwatch became an important symbol of female emancipation as “post-World War I was a time when women began to keep their own time… prior to this, they were always following men… there was no purpose, then, for a woman to keep her own time. But when all the men went to war, women had to hold down the fort back home.”
Like the ‘wristlets’ of yore, and the Cartier Panthère sported by Bella Hadid, Wallner wants to see 2023 as the year the small watch makes a comeback. “I feel like I’ve been screaming into the void since 2020 ‘why are watches so big?’,” she says. “I found that when watch media speaks about trends, they’re always talking about how women should wear men’s watches. But I think the more cutting-edge thing is for it to go the other way, where men should wear women’s watches and just get rid of the labels altogether and kind of let people decide for themselves.”
Wristwatches make time personal again. And with climate doomism continuing to haunt us, the cost-of-living crisis sending workers across the world on strike, and last year’s Big Tech crash, it’s become increasingly clear that we can’t trust our futures to the powers that be. Smartphones make time feel slippery (we’re all familiar with the sickening feeling of checking our phones for the time and then losing 30 minutes to mindless scrolling on social media), but the rhythmic tick of an analogue wristwatch is a cathartic reminder that life keeps on going. There’s a sense of control to be regained by knowing that time is, literally, on our side.
Before investing your life savings in a watch that costs more than the median house price in London, though, Wallner recommends buying something affordable to get used to the feeling of having something on your wrist (again! The benefit of a small watch!): “We’ve been conditioned to not wear watches for so long because we have smartphones to tell the time, so wearing a watch can be an unfamiliar feeling.” For entry-level watches, she recommends looking at Casio (sorry, Shakira) and Seiko — Japanese brands who made high-quality watches accessible by innovating the battery-powered quartz movement — as well as Timex, Swatch, and a new direct-to-consumer brand Breda.
When you’re ready to spend the big bucks on a timepiece from the likes of Omega, Jaeger-LeCoultre or Audemars Piguet. Wallner advises to “buy it to wear and with the intention to pass it down. Treat it as an heirloom, not as something that you could potentially pay your mortgage off with.” Although Megan Markle may have sent royal watchdogs into a spin by stacking what is purportedly Lady Diana’s Cartier Tank Française on the same wrist as other bracelets during her infamous Oprah interview, Wallner is of the belief that “to be intimate with our things — isn’t this what it’s all about? Why buy into the lifestyle if we can’t live it?” Time may be our most precious resource, but watches, like life, are to be lived in.
Looking back on the AW23 shows in Milan and Paris, there was a resounding feeling conveyed by houses like Prada and Loewe that we must return to simplicity as a reassurance in face of our fragile times. And there’s nothing more simply reassuring than a wristwatch: time only moves in one direction after all. Or, as Wallner puts it, “I could be wearing sweatpants and feel like I’ve had a bad day, but then I put a watch on, and I feel elevated.”