Interesting and timely article in light of the Explorer downsizing

[CrookedOak]

Why Men’s Watch Faces Are Getting Smaller
March 30, 2021

Honey, I shrunk the watch face: inside the trend of the more compact men’s watch face, now downsizing at brands like Panerai and Breitling.

This past January, a senior Google executive spent $37,000 on a Patek Philippe Aquanaut from Tropical Watch, a San Francisco–based online dealer of vintage watches. Three months later, the Google exec sold the Aquanaut back to the vendor and bought an older model that was nearly identical, only smaller.

“The new, cool thing to have is smaller,” says Tropical Watch’s owner, Jacek Kozubek. “This is happening all the time.”

A downsizing trend has descended on the world of high-end watches. What’s coveted now is dressier and more demure than it was in recent years, easier to wear and harder to showboat.

The pendulum, in other words, is swinging away from jumbo sport watches. Many of these, which became all the rage in the early aughts, are updates of the easy-to-read timepieces once worn by aviators, divers and others for whom the legibility of the dial could be a matter of life and death. They channel some of the glamour of those high-risk pursuits, when not clanking awkwardly against boardroom tables and doorframes.

Traditionalists deride them as “tuna fish cans.”

The relevant measurement here is case size, or the diameter of the housing of a watch’s dial and movement. In the mid-20th century, a golden era for watch design, most men’s watches were 32mm to 36mm in diameter. Paul Newman and even Gordon Gekko would have likely rejected a case size of 40mm as too beefy, and yet today this is a reasonable, even default, starting point—large enough to read the time easily and yet still comfortable.

Yet five years ago, many non-connoisseurs would have considered a 40mm watch a bit on the small side, especially if they were about to drop five figures on one. That’s changed. “Now the first-time buyer wants a 36mm watch,” says Kozubek, whose core business is in the $20,000–$100,000 range. “This happened in the nerdy watch world years ago, but it’s become more mainstream of late.”

He’s talking about the vintage market, where smaller sizes have generally been more prevalent and popular. Now even luxury vendors found at malls and five-star hotels are noting a slight shrinkage too. Watches of Switzerland, which operates multibrand stores in the U.K. and U.S., saw sales in its largest-diameter watch category—above 43mm—slide from 14 percent of the total in 2016 to just 8 percent in 2020. David Hurley, executive vice president of the retailer’s American division, says that more of the action is now in the 40mm–43mm range. He is starting to see a shift in sub-40mm watch sales in the vintage market with pieces like 36mm Rolex Explorers and 34mm Omega Seamasters, which are often found for around $6,000 and $3,000, respectively (Watches of Switzerland acquired Analog/Shift, a New York–based online vintage dealer, last fall.) Yet this development could be a sign of the future, given the newfound influence of the secondary market. “I think it will affect the design of new watches, these smaller [vintage] watches that are starting to find new demand with men,” Hurley adds. “Come back to us in a year’s time.”

Even the brands known for jumbo timepieces are starting to shave off millimeters. IWC and Breitling last year both introduced popular styles in smaller case sizes. Panerai, which launched the extra-large trend in the late ’90s, ventured below the 40mm mark recently, issuing a Luminor Due that was not only 40 percent thinner than the previous edition but also, at 38mm, the Italian heritage brand’s smallest watch ever. (Prices start at $6,100.)

Misconceptions linger about the appropriate case size for men. Contrary to popular thinking, the difference between a large wrist and a small one is not that huge—a single inch of circumference at most. “I don’t think you need to be a teeny person to wear a smaller case size,” says Matthew Hranek, author of the 2017 book A Man and His Watch. He has sifted through enough old photos of rock stars, Hollywood leading men and World War II fighter pilots to prove it. Even Jay-Z, a collector who is often spotted wearing larger watches, sported a 36mm vintage Rolex courtside at a Los Angeles Lakers game last year.

Another reason mid-30s case sizes are trending: Female collectors reject the notion of distinct men’s and women’s watches. “We are selling a lot of 38mm watches,” says Judith Borowski, chief branding officer of Nomos Glashütte, which is known for its comparatively affordable Bauhaus-inspired designs. Yet 35mm has remained the German brand’s bestselling size. “There are [so] many women buying these watches,” she says. (Both sizes of its bestselling Tangente model retail for around $2,000.)

Similarly, when Jaeger-LeCoultre unveils a 36mm version (starting at $10,600) of its flagship 39mm Master Ultra Thin later this year, it expects the release to appeal to both men and women. The market has shifted slightly—at least in America, where previously the Swiss brand had faced “questions on size,” as Lionel Favre, product design director for Jaeger-LeCoultre, puts it. “Three years ago, we still had requests for watches with a larger diameter. But today these requests are becoming rare.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mens-wa...es-11617107212