Post haste!

When I'm in the mood, I like to search the various watch sites for some fine vintage pieces, it's nice to wallow in the horologist's craft for a good hour or so.

Still, there was one piece of jewelry a man could wear: his watch. This made watches “hot” all of a sudden. The default watch on which one could visibly spend money was the Rolex, so everybody bought a Rolex. But once everybody had a Rolex, wearing a Rolex meant nothing. The “Holy Trinity” of watchmakers — Vacheron Constantin, Patek Philippe, and Audermars Piguet — boosted their prices into the stratosphere to ward off the proles, scarcely understanding that only the (ex-)proles had that kind of money anymore anyway. The demand for new and unique luxury watches far exceeded their supply. What happened next was an odd sort of pre-Cambrian watch explosion as old factories were reopened, meaningless old names were dusted off, and heritages were invented with the sort of free-wheeling fictional license typically reserved for a salesman’s resume. Ulysse Nardin, Bovet, Panerai: out of the Swiss graves and onto the wrists of the oligarchs!

One of the more offensive designs of the Luxury Watchpocalypse was the Hublot “Big Bang”. The recipe for a Big Bang is simple: take the same movement one finds in a $500 Hamilton Jazzmaster watch, put it in a case which is a grotesque, oversized knock-off of Gerald Genta’s designs (full disclosure: your humble author owns a titanium Ingenieur, designed by Mr. Genta), then add a ten-dollar rubber strap to pay homage to Hublot’s “heritage” as a twenty-year-old maker of rubber-strap watches. The resulting watch is “worth” ten thousand dollars or more and is worn by such persons as Bernie Ecclestone (who did an advertisement after he was beaten and robbed of his Big Bang by some watch-ignorant thug who probably overlooked a JLC Master Compressor on the wrist of the guy next to Bernie) and Diego Maradona.

The Big Bang is the perfect “luxury watch”. Its worth consists solely of its price. It is cheap to make and contains cheap parts. Its manufacturer doesn’t even bother to fabricate a “heritage” the way the brand-disinternment crowd does. The only reason to wear a Big Bang is to advertise that one can afford to wear one. Plain and simple. They aren’t even well-made within the confines of their modest technical brief; at a very rainy Petit LeMans a few years ago, a good friend of mine endured the agony of watching his Big Bang Carbon’s face cloud up with internal condensation from an improperly-sealed case. Fifteen grand for a watch you can’t wear in the rain! Luckily it never rains in the Moscow EDM clubs or at David Guetta’s Ibiza DJ-in-residence gigs, or the Hublot would be entirely worthless. Hublot’s razor-sharp sense that a Big Bang is only valuable because of its sticker price finds its most sublime expression in the “Big Bang $3m”, a Big Bang which was loaded with enough diamonds and other junk to not-really-justify a price of three million dollars. Apparently someone was willing to buy it, which caused Hublot to release the “Big Bang $5m” this past year in search of the proverbial bigger fool.

Not everyone is so readily fooled, however, so Hublot and other watchmakers are busy CAD-creating their own “manufacture movements” to replace the generic ETA/Sellita/Valjoux movements found in their products. In this, the Cretaceous period of watch enthusiasm, the ability to engineer and manufacture one’s own mechanical watch movement is essential for “credibility”. Not that the genuine prestige watchmakers all used their own movements anyways, but there’s a certain amount of Cadillac-at-the-Nurburgring idiocy going on: Rolex makes their own movements, and they are a respected brand, so we need to have our own movements as well, even more complicated and feature-packed, and then we will be more respected than Rolex.

There’s just one little problem with that strategy. The proliferation of quick-bake “manufacture” movements is creating an entire generation of hugely expensive, amazingly complicated, completely “bespoke” watches which will be impossible to fix. Most watch repairmen can fix the ETA 2892 movement found in affordable Swiss watches, and most watch repairmen can fix a Rolex because they are numerous and well-documented, but can anybody fix a Grand Complication Tourbillon watch from some company which was in business for three years, selling watches at $150,000 a pop to Chinese entrepreneurs, before going bankrupt and disappearing?

Of course not. These watches, which can’t match a eleven-dollar Taliban graduation watch for accuracy, are also imperfectly ticking down the seconds to their own deaths. That’s good! They are even more perfect as luxury items than the original Hublot Big Bangs, because they are ephemeral. There’s something unpleasantly Protestant about a Rolex, you see. One might wear it for a lifetime, or buy it used, or simply purchase it affordably on the used market and enjoy it for a long time. It isn’t a perfect statement of immediate, current, present wealth. A Rolex or Omega might cost as much as a Ulysse Nardin, but how can one be sure that one just bought it for a large sum of cash on the barrelhead? It might be old, or refurbished! It isn’t a true luxury good unless it expires, the same way a trip to Spain expires, the same way a week in a five-star hotel expires. Only then is it completely unnecessary, totally flashy, utterly ephemeral.

http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2012/10/avoidable-contact-the-watery-big-bang-the-32-step-power-steering-fluid-check-disposable-faux-ury/

Bravo.

That's true, and the move to reinvent the watches of their illustrious past was the right move back in the 90s, but then again, they had to do something as they were being seriously overwhelmed by wave after wave of fakes in the early 1990s.

Same over here, there use to be spivs selling them in industrial quantities on construction sites/Hoover factories/the local corner shop/bank/high street/market - the world had reached saturation point of those watches from here to Timbuktu. They had no where to go to redeem the brand, but up market!