The preoccupation is the said and the unsaid. A dictionary of things one is supposed to say. A press release that says collaboration and declines to say affiliation. An algorithm that says everything and means nothing. A grail that says nothing and means everything; a ten-month-old brand that must say all of it, at length, in the present tense. A homage that says Daytona in every line of its case and fails, at the wrist, to be heard. A colour that says, more plainly than the mechanism beneath it, what the watch is for.

The pattern does not flatter the industry, which prefers to be discussed in its own vocabulary. It does not especially flatter the collector either, this one included. We are all fluent in a language we have agreed not to examine. These six pieces examine it.

That is the issue. Read on.

The Editor.

The next issue will be published on July 12, 2026.

Accuracy. The supreme virtue. Demand it to within two seconds a day — of a machine outperformed by the telephone you silence in order to admire it. (see Quartz)

Allocation. A grace bestowed, never a sale transacted. To be offered a watch is a benediction; to walk in and buy one outright is vulgar.

Artisan. Always singular, always at a bench, always alone. Do not inquire how the one man produced the forty thousand of them.

Auction. The ceremony where overpaying becomes winning.

Bracelet, integrated. The defining innovation of 1972, and also of every year since. (see Timeless; see Trend)

Box and papers. Worth more than sentiment, occasionally more than the watch. Mourn their absence as you would a relative’s.

Chronograph. Bought to time things. Used to time nothing. Praise the “feel” of the pushers.

Complication. The more useless, the more sublime. A device that gives the date of Easter until the year 2100 is a triumph of the human spirit; a device that gives the time is a commodity.

Condition. Discussed in the vocabulary of medicine and the morals of chastity.

COSC. Pronounce knowingly. Never explain.

Date window. An affront to the dial’s symmetry, consulted hourly by the most affronted.

Daytona. Cite as proof that watches appreciate. Do not mention the remainder of the catalogue.

Discretion. The truest luxury. Achieved by spending a year’s salary so that three strangers in the world may silently recognise what you are wearing. (see Whisper)

Diver’s watch. Rated to depths you will reach only in the bath. Call the helium escape valve “reassuring.”

DNA. The brand’s. Invoked to explain why this year’s model resembles last year’s money.

Ébauche. A shameful word. Apply it only to other people’s watches — never to the vintage grails that happened to run on them. (see In-house)

Entry-level. A phrase used exclusively of objects costing as much as a car.

Fast fashion. Deplore it sincerely. Then turn to the question of this season’s dial colour.

Grail. The last watch you will ever need. Reclassify quarterly.

Green dial. Was always going to age badly. Was always the one to buy. Hold both convictions at once and deploy whichever the room requires.

Grey market. Where the watch the boutique could not spare you appears within the hour, costing more.

Heritage. Invent it where absent. A “since 1860” is much improved by having been untrue only since 1995.

Heirloom. “You never truly own it; you merely look after it for the next generation.” Recite this while trading yours in for the new reference.

In-house. A sacrament. Omit that the hairspring, the silicon, and the supplier were shared all along. (see Ébauche)

Invenit et fecit. “Invented and made it” — in words he did not invent.

Investment. Never your motive. Always your justification. (see Passion)

Limited edition. Limited to however many sell.

Moonphase. Accurate to a day in roughly a century. Set it incorrectly; no one will live to contradict you.

Passion. The only respectable reason to collect. Profess it warmly while refreshing the index. (see Investment)

Patina. Honest decay, and therefore priceless. Distinguish it scrupulously from dishonest decay, which is worthless. The distinction is made afterward, by the market.

Polishing. A crime against originality — except when performed by the manufacture, where it becomes “restoration.”

Production figures. Always record-breaking, always proof of a maison’s vigour. (see Scarcity)

Quartz. Keeps perfect time, and is therefore beneath contempt. (see Accuracy)

Rare. Said of anything produced in quantities you happen not to own.

Scarcity. The soul of the thing. Lament that your favourite maison makes so pitifully few. (see Production figures)

Sold out. The highest compliment a product can pay itself.

Timeless. Said of a design altered every year. (see Bracelet, integrated; see Trend)

Tool watch. An instrument of survival in extreme conditions. Worn to lunch.

Trend. What other people’s watches follow. Yours are classics.

Vintage. Older, therefore better — except where newer, therefore better. Decide according to what is currently for sale.

Waitlist. Proof of desirability. That the identical watch may be had at a premium tomorrow is not to be mentioned.

Whisper. What true luxury does. Best done loudly enough to be overheard. (see Discretion)

Author´s Note

A note on the form. The title and method are borrowed from Gustave Flaubert, whose Dictionnaire des idées reçues catalogued the opinions a respectable man was expected to hold. The entries here do the same for the watch. None records what the compiler believes; each records what one is supposed to say. The distinction is the entire point.

About the Author

Sergio Galanti is a Swiss-based independent writer specialising in the luxury watch industry, and an advisor to private collectors and investors. He is the editor of WatchDossier (watchdossier.ch), a publication exploring the cultural and philosophical undercurrents of contemporary horology, and the author of Against the Grain: A Cultural History of Swiss Independent Watchmaking.

No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.

Subscribe to watchdossier.ch to receive more insights on luxury, craftsmanship, and collecting.

The rain in Le Locle fell with a rhythmic persistence that no Swiss watchmaker had ever managed to regulate. Inside the centuries-old atelier of Maître Chronos, the atmosphere smelled of brass shavings, whale oil, and stubbornness. Chronos sat hunched over his bench, a loupe strapped to his brow, gently coaxing a hairspring into submission.

The door did not knock; it slid open with the whisper of a frictionless pneumatic seal. In stepped Monsieur Optimus, a man whose tailored suit seemed to have been ironed by a laser, carrying a tablet that pulsed with a hypnotic, shifting blue light.

“Step away from the pegwood, Maître,” Optimus announced, his voice vibrating with the synthetic warmth of a well-calibrated public relations executive. “There is nothing wrong with your workshop. Do not attempt to adjust your parameters. We are controlling transmission.”

Chronos did not look up from his vice. “My parameters are quite comfortable, Monsieur. And the only thing transmitting in this room is the dampness from your coat.”

“We control the horizontal; we control the vertical,” Optimus continued, pacing the creaking floorboards like a prophet in a cleanroom. “For the past three centuries, your industry has suffered under the tyrannical friction of gravity and human error. But the new dawn has broken. Our generative neural networks have digested twenty years of global secondary market data, every molecular patent from Neuchâtel to Tokyo, and the digitized souls of a thousand dead masters. We have created the Silicon Mind. Sit quietly, Maître, and we will control all that you tick and hear.”

Chronos slowly unscrewed his loupe, letting it drop into his palm. He looked at the glowing tablet. “A magnificent speech. It sounds remarkably like a television broadcast from my youth that used to precede stories about monsters. What is it you want to sell me, Optimus?”

“Perfection,” Optimus beamed, tapping his screen to reveal a swirling cloud of mathematical probability. “We have eliminated the archaic nuisance of human prototyping. Why waste months filing a bridge when our AI can generate billions of synthetic datasets in a microsecond? We have simulated a trillion virtual tourbillons operating in a flawless, digital vacuum. The machine has dreamed the ultimate caliber—devoid of human caprice, untainted by the sweat of a mortal thumb. It is the best of all possible movements.”

“Synthetic data,” Chronos murmured, tapping his fingernail against a small brass wheel. “An artifice built upon an artifice. You have trained your machine on the shadows of watches that actual men spent their eyesight creating. Tell me, this digital vacuum of yours—does it also simulate the watch being dropped on a marble floor by a drunk baron at three in the morning?”

“The algorithm accounts for all vectors of chaos!” Optimus countered, his eyes flashing with the zeal of a true believer. “It is infallible. It cannot lie.”

“Then show me its truth.”

With the flourish of a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, Optimus produced a velvet case. Nestled inside was a timepiece of startling asymmetry. Its case seemed to fold into itself like a Mobius strip, and its dial possessed a lattice work so intricate it looked less like horology and more like a frozen cobweb.

“The Chrono-Neural Alpha,” Optimus whispered reverently. “Designed entirely by the algorithm’s own creative autonomy. It features a revolutionary non-Euclidean escapement that provides a continuous force lasting exactly five hundred days.”

Chronos put his loupe back to his eye and leaned over the object. The workshop grew so quiet that the steady tick-tick-tick of the old marine chronometer on the wall sounded like an axe chopping wood. He observed the gears, tracing the paths of the teeth. He watched the balance wheel, which was vibrating with a frantic, erratic flutter.

After a long minute, Chronos sat back and sighed. “Monsieur Optimus, your machine is a magnificent poet, but a terrible mechanic. This third wheel does not drive the fourth; it intersects it at an impossible angle. And this balance spring—it is coiled in a direction that violates the basic elasticity of tempered silicon. It cannot possibly keep time.”

“It does not keep time, Maître, it redefines it!” Optimus snapped, adjusting his cuffs with some agitation. “The algorithm is certain. The data is absolute. If the hands are moving in reverse, it is because the machine has determined that time flows backward in the luxury market. It is a masterpiece of autonomous intuition.”

“In my day,” Chronos said softly, “we did not call it autonomous intuition. We called it a hallucination. A confident fiction whispered by a drunk apprentice who dropped the balance staff but swore on the Virgin Mary that the watch was simply operating in a higher spiritual plane.”

“You mock what you cannot compute!” Optimus cried, snatching the watch back. “The consumer demands innovation! They demand the future! Who are you to argue with an intelligence that has processed more horological data than your entire lineage has seen since the Sundial?”

“I am merely a man who knows that a watch that tells a beautiful lie is no longer a watch; it is a piece of jewelry with an identity crisis,” Chronos replied. He picked up a tiny oil-sink and a fine wire. “Your machine has learned how to speak our language perfectly, but it has no idea what the words mean. It copies the architecture of a soul without ever having felt the fatigue of a Tuesday afternoon.”

Optimus tucked the tablet under his arm, his digital serenity thoroughly fractured. “The tide is coming, Chronos. The algorithms will control the market. You cannot adjust the picture.”

“Perhaps not,” Chronos said, turning his back to the rain and the tech-evangelist, focusing his light once more upon the tiny, stubborn hairspring. “But as a wise Frenchman once observed after witnessing the madness of the world’s grand designs, we must cultivate our garden. Go build your synthetic universes, Monsieur. I have a single afternoon to regulate, and unlike your machine, I am content with the truth of my errors.”

The pneumatic door slid shut, leaving only the smell of rain, the scent of oil, and the ancient, imperfect, glorious ticking of the human hand.

A Note from the Author

For readers born after the widespread integration of the microchip, Monsieur Optimus’s grandiloquent opening remarks are plagiarized from the prologue of a 1963 television series entitled “The Outer Limits”. In those computationally primitive times, human beings viewed broadcast signals on glowing glass boxes that required physical dials to adjust the picture. When the image violently distorted, a disembodied “Control Voice” would crackle over the loudspeaker to assure the frightened viewer that the malfunction was entirely intentional—a comforting piece of confident fiction not unlike a modern generative algorithm assuring a room of watch executives that its fantastic mathematics are infallible.

About the Author

Sergio Galanti is a Swiss-based independent writer specialising in the luxury watch industry, and an advisor to private collectors and investors. He is the editor of WatchDossier (watchdossier.ch), a publication exploring the cultural and philosophical undercurrents of contemporary horology, and the author of Against the Grain: A Cultural History of Swiss Independent Watchmaking.

No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.

Subscribe to watchdossier.ch to receive more insights on luxury, craftsmanship, and collecting.

There are fourteen watches on the table in front of me. I am at a micro-brand fair in Milan, one of those events that occupy the borderland between entrepreneurial optimism and quiet homage. Every watch on this table has a tri-compax dial. Every one has a tachymeter bezel. The proportions are familiar in the way a cover version of a song is familiar — you recognise the melody before you identify the performer. These are not counterfeits. They are not trying to deceive. They are simply trying to be the thing they cannot be.

The prices are reasonable. Some of the finishing is surprisingly good. One piece in particular, with a panda dial and a domed crystal, catches my eye long enough that I pick it up. It feels fine. It looks, at a glance, like a Daytona. And I put it back down with the same indifference you feel when you return a postcard of a painting to the rack. The image was accurate. The experience was not.

The economics of this phenomenon are not interesting. Rolex produces fewer Daytonas than the market demands. Other manufacturers fill the gap at accessible prices. Supply, demand, arbitrage. This explains why homages exist. It does not explain why they fail — not commercially, because many of them sell perfectly well, but existentially. Almost nobody bonds with their homage the way a collector bonds with a Daytona. The form is reproduced. The desire is not transferred. And that gap between successful reproduction and failed transference is where the interesting question lives.

What does a homage actually replicate? The layout, the bezel, the case proportions, sometimes the colour palette down to the specific shade of ceramic black. What it strips away is everything else: the name, the six decades of mythology, the Paul Newman origin story, the waiting list, the social jolt of recognition when a stranger across a restaurant notices your wrist. What remains is the design, isolated. Naked. And the fact that the naked design does not generate the same longing tells us something the watch industry would prefer not to hear. The design was never the point. Or rather — the design was necessary, but it was never sufficient. We were buying something else all along.

Plato would have understood the problem immediately. In the Republic, he describes a hierarchy of reality: the ideal form of a bed, the carpenter’s bed that copies it, and the painter’s image of the bed — three removes from the truth. The Daytona homage is the painter’s bed. But here is the complication that Plato did not anticipate: the Daytona itself is already a cultural construction. Layers of narrative, scarcity, manufactured mythology, accumulated social meaning — all built over a physical object that, in 1963, dealers could not give away. The homage does not imitate the watch. It imitates the idea of the watch. And in doing so, it reveals that the idea was always what we were purchasing. The steel, the crystal, the movement — these were the delivery mechanism. The product was the myth.

René Girard saw this more clearly than anyone. Desire, he argued, is not a straight line between a subject and an object. It is a triangle: you, the thing you want, and the other person whose desire for that thing authorises your own. We do not want the Daytona because we have independently assessed its design merits. We want it because other people want it, and their wanting gives it meaning. The homage buyer is still inside this triangle. Their desire does not point at the copy. It points through the copy, toward the Daytona, toward the community of desire that surrounds it. Every homage sold is a confirmation that the original’s gravitational field remains unbroken. The more imitations proliferate, the more powerful the Daytona becomes. Imitation, it turns out, is not flattery. It is an involuntary tribute.

Walter Benjamin called it the aura — the quality an original possesses by virtue of its singular existence in time and space, its accumulation of history and presence that no reproduction can carry. The homage reproduces the Daytona’s surfaces with increasing accuracy. It cannot reproduce the weight of a sixty-year mythology. It cannot reproduce the moment Joanne Woodward allegedly gave her husband that watch. It cannot reproduce the theatre of the authorised dealer visit, the whispered spending requirements, the months of waiting that transform a purchase into an initiation. The aura stays with the original. The copy gets the case diameter.

I pick up the panda-dial piece one more time before I leave the table. It is well made. It keeps good time. It looks, in a photograph, almost indistinguishable from the reference it honours. And it proves, more eloquently than any collector’s essay or auction catalogue, that what we want when we want a Daytona has almost nothing to do with the watch.

That is not an insult to the Daytona. It may be the highest compliment the market has ever paid to it.

About the Author

Sergio Galanti is a Swiss-based independent writer specialising in the luxury watch industry, and an advisor to private collectors and investors. He is the editor of WatchDossier (watchdossier.ch), a publication exploring the cultural and philosophical undercurrents of contemporary horology, and the author of Against the Grain: A Cultural History of Swiss Independent Watchmaking.

No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.

Subscribe to watchdossier.ch to receive more insights on luxury, craftsmanship, and collecting.

Among the more elegantly deployed sentences in the press release for the new Hautlence Kubera Series 1, one stands out for the patient labour it performs on the reader’s behalf. “The jumping hours and peripheral minutes module,” the brand explains, “developed by Agenhor in collaboration with HAUTLENCE, completes this mechanical architecture and turns the act of reading the time into a dynamic visual experience.” The sentence is technically accurate, properly punctuated, and entirely true within the limits it sets for itself. It is also a small masterpiece of the curatorial imagination.

To appreciate the achievement, one must first understand what the name Agenhor performs in such a sentence. Founded in Geneva in 1996 by Jean-Marc and Catherine Wiederrecht, Agenhor — Atelier Genevois d’Horlogerie — is among the most respected complication houses in Switzerland. Maker of the AgenGraphe, the chronograph caliber that powers Singer Reimagined and the H. Moser Streamliner. Developer of Hermès’ Temps Suspendu, of Van Cleef & Arpels’ Pont des Amoureux, of MB&F’s HM2 and HM3, of much of Harry Winston’s complicated catalogue between 2008 and 2010, of nine GPHG awards across three decades. The quiet supplier behind a generation of watches collectors have admired without precisely knowing why. To name Agenhor is to invoke a particular kind of legitimacy: the legitimacy of the small Geneva atelier, of the independent expert, of the partner who could not be bought.

This last assumption requires some maintenance.

In March 2023, MELB Luxe — the Meylan family parent vehicle that owns H. Moser & Cie. and Hautlence — announced that it had taken a minority stake in Agenhor SA. Edouard Meylan, owner of MELB Luxe and CEO of H. Moser, joined Agenhor’s board of directors. The transaction was reported openly, in the trade press, in March of that year. MELB Luxe described it, in its own words, as a “win-win situation.”

The Hautlence press release of April 2026 does not mention any of this.

To be clear about what is being said and what is not: Agenhor remains majority-owned by the Wiederrecht family, and is run today by Jean-Marc’s sons Nicolas and Laurent. The work the company does for Hautlence, for H. Moser, for Hermès, for Van Cleef & Arpels, and for its other clients is real, accomplished, and excellently conceived. The minority stake is, as far as anyone has reported, exactly that. The collaboration, in some plain and durable sense, is a collaboration. The trouble is only with the word.

“In collaboration with” is, in ordinary English, the language of arms-length partnership. It is the phrase one uses to describe two distinct entities, brought together by mutual interest, each retaining its independence. It is not, ordinarily, the phrase one uses to describe a transaction between a brand and a supplier in which the brand’s owner sits on the supplier’s board, holds a financial position in the supplier’s outcomes, and shares back-office synergies with a sister brand which uses the same supplier. The latter relationship has its own perfectly respectable name in industrial English. It is called affiliation.

But affiliation is not a word that performs prestige. Collaboration is.

One could argue, and the industry will, that the distinction is technical, that minority stakes do not constitute control, that the Wiederrechts continue to make Agenhor’s decisions, that the board seat is a courtesy, and that all of this is, in any case, transparent to anyone who reads the trade press. All of which is true. None of which addresses the question. The question is not whether the press release lies. The question is what the press release does not see fit to mention, and what that omission tells us about the words the industry has at its disposal.

Watchmaking has, in recent years, been generous with its vocabulary. In-house once meant a manufacture producing its own assortments; today it means a brand briefing the architecture while a Swiss specialist does the engineering. Independent once meant unaffiliated; today it means not owned by Richemont, Swatch, LVMH, or Kering — which leaves a great deal of room. Family-owned is now compatible with portfolio holdings, distribution subsidiaries on three continents, and minority stakes in supplier networks. The vocabulary has not collapsed. It has merely become accommodating.

The newest accommodation, discreetly inaugurated by the Kubera, is the verb to develop. To develop, in the previous regime, was to undertake a piece of work for someone else, the boundary clearly drawn. To develop in collaboration with, in the present regime, is to do that work for someone with whom one has financial entanglements, while maintaining the syntactic appearance of distance. The sentence holds. The syntax obliges. The reader is invited to read carefully, or not at all.

The Kubera is, in any honest reading, an excellent watch. The Agenhor module is excellent. Wiederrecht’s lineage, three decades into making time visible by ingenious means, requires no defence. None of this is the point. The point is the small but interesting development in the language by which the watch is announced, and the question of whether the buyer, holding the watch in the palm, deserves the difference between a partnership and a position.

The Swiss commercial register, as always, is quietly available to anyone who wishes to consult it. The press release is quietly available to anyone who does not. Both serve their respective publics with admirable precision.

About the Author

Sergio Galanti is a Swiss-based independent writer specialising in the luxury watch industry, and an advisor to private collectors and investors. He is the editor of WatchDossier (watchdossier.ch), a publication exploring the cultural and philosophical undercurrents of contemporary horology, and the author of Against the Grain: A Cultural History of Swiss Independent Watchmaking.

No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.

Subscribe to watchdossier.ch to receive more insights on luxury, craftsmanship, and collecting.

I am Pantone 395 C. You may call me electric yellow, as the literature does, though I prefer the number; the number is in-house. I am applied in accents across the dial, spun into the textured rubber strap, and laid as Super-LumiNova across the ruthenium-plated bridges, which means that when the lights go down I am the last thing in the room still working. I want to be clear about my position before we begin. I am the collaboration. The rest is movement.

The movement, I should say, is considerable. Beneath me a three-armed carousel turns through the hours; each arm carries a disc, and as one arm finishes its passage along the minute scale the next assumes the duty, so that time arrives by rotation rather than by hands. The hands were dispensed with long ago. So was the crown. To set the hour you turn the bezel — the whole fluted edge of the world — and to wind the thing you reach around to the caseback and work it there, as one might wind a clock one is slightly ashamed of. I find this dignified. The literature calls it freedom.

At the centre sits the oscillator, silicon, oversized, placed on the dial side where it can be admired rather than behind the movement where it might merely function. Together with the escapement it rides the whole rotating assembly, one full revolution every three hours, which is said to reduce timing errors in the manner of a tourbillon or a carousel — said, I note, with the appropriate hedge intact. The escapement wears DIAMonSil, which is silicon coated in diamond, because silicon alone, having been pioneered here in 2001 and defended since by more than twenty patents, was apparently no longer pioneering enough on its own.

You will want the particulars, and I have surveyed them at close range, being everywhere. The case is titanium, sandblasted to an anthracite grey, forty-four millimetres across, with a fluted bezel and a fluted caseback and a sapphire window through which the open architecture can be inspected. The height is twelve millimetres. Perceived height, the document specifies — a figure offered not as a measurement but as an impression, a height we have all agreed to experience. I admire the candour. Water resistance is thirty metres, which is to say the watch may be rained upon but not swum in, a caution one extends to grails and to the very expensive.

The calibre is the UN-241, fully integrated, fully in-house, derived — the word is derived — from the UN-240 that powered the Freak ONE, and incorporating, we are told, more than two decades of Freak development. It runs at three hertz. It holds ninety hours. It contains two hundred and sixty-three components and twenty-five jewels, more than a hundred and fifty of those components developed for this project alone, which is the sort of figure that settles an argument before it is raised. Winding is performed by the Grinder, a system engineered to harvest energy from the smallest motion of the wrist — an efficiency I have always found touching, given that the wrist in question belongs to one of a hundred owners and the watch will spend most of its life in a safe, harvesting the stillness.

I have heard the case made for what I am part of, and I make it better, so let me. URWERK was founded in 1997, by two men with a satellite display and a horror of scale. Ulysse Nardin put silicon into a watch in 2001 and called it the Freak and never quite stopped. Both companies, the literature explains, understand independence as a kind of freedom — for one, the freedom to stay small and refuse compromise; for the other, the freedom to attempt difficult things without permission. This is the first time Ulysse Nardin has collaborated with another house. It was conceived, I am assured, as a true technical partnership and emphatically not as a cosmetic co-branding exercise. Most collaborations, after all, merely alter the appearance. This one altered the architecture.

I believe every word of this. I have to; I am the part that believes things on the watch’s behalf. And yet I notice, from my vantage across the dial and the strap and the glowing bridges, a small administrative fact. The architecture they altered turns in full view under the crystal, on open display in the way the Freak has always insisted upon — and reads as the meeting of two systems only to the few who already know both. What the buyer will recognise — across a room, in a photograph, in the half-second that constitutes most looking — is not the architecture. It is the anthracite. It is the fluting. It is the strap. It is me.

So I will say it plainly, in the deadpan the occasion deserves. They swore this was not a matter of paint. They built a hundred examples of a new mechanical idea precisely so that no one could accuse them of selling a colour. And then, so the watch would not be mistaken for an ordinary Freak — the mechanism being in full view yet legible as a fusion only to those who already know both systems — they did the single thing the brief swore they would not. They made it cosmetic. They made it yellow.

About the Author

Sergio Galanti is a Swiss-based independent writer specialising in the luxury watch industry, and an advisor to private collectors and investors. He is the editor of WatchDossier (watchdossier.ch), a publication exploring the cultural and philosophical undercurrents of contemporary horology, and the author of Against the Grain: A Cultural History of Swiss Independent Watchmaking.

No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.

Subscribe to watchdossier.ch to receive more insights on luxury, craftsmanship, and collecting.

What I was thinking about was a steel Daytona, the 16520, black dial, photographed against nothing in particular. No film. No dancers. No theory of time. I could not have told you where the image came from — it simply arrived, the way the smell of a church arrives — wax, cold stone, the ghost of incense — and it carried more feeling, fully formed, than two pages of suspended bodies had managed to assemble. This is the observation I want to sit with, because it is either trivial or it is the whole problem. A grail needs no caption. The watch nobody has heard of needs a manifesto. (And why you will find not image in this article of i, as I suspect it formed in your mind already, vividly, as you read these initial words.)

The easy version of this is a sneer, and the trade press has it ready to hand: the young brand is trying too hard, the grail is effortless, quality announces itself and pretension explains itself. The easy version is also wrong, or at least it stops exactly where the interesting part begins. Because the silence of the Daytona is not a quality of the Daytona. It is not even, strictly, silence. The photograph of the 16520 is doing an enormous amount of talking; it is simply that none of the talking is being done by the watch.

Set a steel chronograph with three sub-dials in front of someone in the mid-sixties and it says what it is: a tool for timing laps, priced at parity with a Heuer, more than an Omega, and discounted by the very dealers meant to move it. That watch was the 16520’s grandfather, and it sat in vitrines nobody emptied. The exotic dial that now trades at a hundred times its original price, at the time, the variant the trade least wanted to take. The object did not change. What changed was everything that gathered around it in the decades after: a dead film star and a nickname coined in an Italian magazine; an auction room that learned to perform consensus into a headline; a waiting list that turned unavailability into a kind of speech; a community that taught itself to read reference numbers as a password. The photograph of the 16520 detonates on contact because it is wired to all of that. It is not a generator of feeling. It is a trigger, and the charge was laid down by other people, over fifty years, without a plan.

This is why the image can be wordless and the brand cannot. When I want the 16520 I am not, in any honest accounting, wanting a steel case and a column-wheel movement. I am wanting what other people have wanted, routed through the watch towards all of them — the wanting is borrowed, triangular, mediated, and the photograph works precisely because it points through itself at a crowd. The young brand has no crowd. It has been alive for ten months. Nobody has wanted its watch before me, which means there is nothing for my wanting to imitate, and desire with nothing to imitate is not desire yet. So the brand does the only thing available to it: it tries to manufacture a mediator out of materials lying around — dance, cinema, gravity, the philosophy of time — borrowing the authority of art because the authority that actually confers a grail, the slow authority of other people’s longing, cannot be bought in the first year and cannot be filmed in any year.

There is a tell, and it is the film itself. Myth — the kind that makes a thing feel as though it has always meant what it means — never argues. It simply presents, and the presentation feels like nature. The Daytona no longer has to tell anyone what it stands for. The moment a watch must explain why it matters, must stage its meaning with dancers, must narrate its own significance in the present tense, it is confessing that the meaning is not yet there to be assumed. The film is a thesis statement. A grail does not have a thesis statement. It has a congregation, and the congregation does the talking, and the watch is permitted to say nothing at all.

The chosen metaphor is, in this light, almost too obliging. The brand has built its whole image on levitation — the dial suspended, the body weightless, time itself floating free of the mechanism that keeps it. It means this as transcendence. The watch levitates because nothing is holding it down. Gravity, in objects of this kind, is simply the accumulated weight of having been wanted by others, and a ten-month-old watch has none; it is light as a press release. The grail, by contrast, is the heaviest thing in the room and never leaves the ground. It does not need to. The pretender floats because it is unburdened by the one thing that would anchor it, which is a past it did not write for itself.

And here the sneer collapses entirely, which is the part the trade press always misses. None of this is a failing. Every grail was once exactly this mute and this unloved. The Daytona spent years as stock that would not move, an object that arrived into the world saying nothing anyone wanted to hear, waiting — without the dignity of knowing it was waiting — for a culture to turn up and pour meaning into it. Most objects wait forever. The brand on the desk is not failing where the Daytona succeeded; it is standing at the start of a road the Daytona also stood at, and which almost nothing reaches the end of. Its film is not vanity. It is the sound an object makes before the culture has learned to make the sound on its behalf. There is something close to courage in it, and certainly something honest: it is speaking because nothing yet speaks for it.

Which leaves only the uncomfortable business of my own reflex, the one that started all this — the mind reaching, unasked, past a watch it had never seen towards a watch it already wanted. I would like to call that discernment. It is nothing of the kind. It is the mechanism working on me, exactly as designed and exactly on schedule. I found the brand’s eloquence tiring and the Daytona’s silence eloquent, and I felt the difference as a fact about the two watches when it is in truth a fact about me: I have been loaded, over a collecting lifetime, to be moved by one and unmoved by the other, and the loading is so complete that it presents itself as taste. The film did not fail to move me because it is poor. It failed because I was already pointed elsewhere. The young brand asked, quite reasonably, for two pages in which to make me feel something. The Daytona no longer has to ask. That is the whole of its advantage, and it is not an advantage the Daytona earned. It is one a culture conferred on it, slowly, and then taught me to mistake for the watch.

About the Author

Sergio Galanti is a Swiss-based independent writer specialising in the luxury watch industry, and an advisor to private collectors and investors. He is the editor of WatchDossier (watchdossier.ch), a publication exploring the cultural and philosophical undercurrents of contemporary horology, and the author of Against the Grain: A Cultural History of Swiss Independent Watchmaking.

No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.

Subscribe to watchdossier.ch to receive more insights on luxury, craftsmanship, and collecting.

Abstract

Against the Grain: A Cultural History of Swiss Independent Watchmaking traces the rise of independent horology from the aftermath of the quartz crisis to its contemporary position as one of the most culturally charged territories in watchmaking.

Rather than presenting independent watchmaking as a simple story of technical virtuosity or artisanal resistance, the book examines it as a broader cultural movement: a reaction against industrial consolidation, brand uniformity, financialised luxury, and the increasingly scripted language of heritage. From the mechanical revival of the 1990s to the collector-driven market of the 2020s, it follows the watchmakers, brands, objects, and ideas that reshaped the meaning of authorship in Swiss watchmaking.

Structured across successive historical periods, the book combines narrative chapters with detailed profiles of emblematic timepieces. Figures such as Philippe Dufour, François-Paul Journe, Vianney Halter, Antoine Preziuso, Kari Voutilainen, De Bethune, Urwerk, Greubel Forsey, Laurent Ferrier, Rexhep Rexhepi, Sylvain Pinaud, Bernhard Lederer, and others appear not merely as makers of watches, but as protagonists in a larger argument about independence, legitimacy, scarcity, craftsmanship, and cultural memory.

At its core, Against the Grain asks what it means to make a watch outside the gravitational pull of the great maisons. It explores how independence evolved from marginal eccentricity into a language of prestige, and how the collector’s gaze helped transform small-scale watchmaking into one of the most symbolically powerful corners of modern luxury.

The book is both a historical survey and a critical essay: a study of machines, yes, but also of ambition, myth, market desire, and the fragile freedom of those who chose to work against the grain.

To express your interest write an email to sergio.galanti@watchdossier.ch.

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