Five Objects, One Question: What Do We Really Collect?
An Auction Report from Antiquorum Hong Kong.
On November 30 at Antiquorum in Hong Kong, five disparate watches converged in an auction that revealed the emotional economies underpinning collecting—nostalgia, performance, mythmaking, and the quiet fear of losing cultural memory.
Auctions sometimes assembled groups of watches that felt less like curated sales and more like sociological accidents. On November 30 at Antiquorum in Hong Kong, five pieces—ranging from a mid-century Longines flyback to a plastic-cased Swatch tourbillon—formed an unintended but revealing constellation. They spoke not to linear progress but to the cyclical anxieties and aspirations of late-20th-century watch culture: nostalgia, performance, storytelling, and the fragile desire to anchor oneself through objects that pretended to mark time but instead measured sentiment.
Together, they outlined a thin yet legible history of how mechanical watches persisted after their practical necessity had collapsed. The Longines represented the era when Swiss industry still believed utility and refinement could coexist without marketing theatrics. The 1990s Girard-Perregaux Ferrari edition captured the decade’s love of licensed identity—prestige by association rather than by movement alone. Breguet’s Type XX revival channeled the martial mythos consumers continued to crave even as real-world aviation became more automated and less romantic. Rolex’s Zenith-powered Daytona stood at the threshold of the modern collecting economy, a watch that predated the “in-house absolutism” that would later be declared sacred. And the Swatch Diaphane One offered a radically different proposition: a high complication rendered in plastic, suggesting that playfulness could coexist with mechanical virtuosity.
Viewed together, these watches asked an unfashionable question: had we been collecting for heritage, for aesthetics, for narrative, or simply for the comfort of belonging to an interpretive community that told us what should matter?
Girard-Perregaux Ref. 8090 Ferrari 250 GT TDF
This GP–Ferrari collaboration was a 1990s artifact of aspirational alignment. It channeled the automotive mythos not through mechanical kinship—Cal. 2280 was a respectable but conventional automatic—but through symbolic adjacency. The watch reflected a decade when luxury brands outsourced identity to partnerships, hoping some reflected aura would compensate for industrial consolidation and a still-fragile post-Quartz confidence. Its aesthetics were typical GP of the period: clean dial layout, moderate case proportions, legibility without drama. Repairability remained straightforward; parts availability continued to be stable, a benefit of GP’s relatively modular movement strategies of the era. Collectors today may find interest not in the Ferrari tie-in itself but in what it revealed about the industry’s transitional psychology. It served as a reminder that the 1990s were less about authenticity than about narrative engineering—an honesty, in its own way.
Rolex Ref. 16520 Daytona
The Zenith-powered Daytona occupied a unique cultural pressure point: a watch born before scarcity became an institution. Its Cal. 4030—Rolex’s heavily modified El Primero—undermined modern purism by demonstrating that excellence had long relied on shared industrial expertise. Aesthetically, the 16520 remained one of the most balanced Daytonas: thin-bezel restraint, harmonious subdial spacing, and a dial architecture that avoided the muscular assertiveness of contemporary references. Repairability remained robust but increasingly dependent on specialist independents as Rolex retreated from servicing pre-modern references. Collectors appreciated it not merely for its transitional status but for its reminder that even Rolex once participated in a more interdependent Swiss ecosystem. It was a watch that accidentally exposed our contemporary myths: exclusivity as destiny, in-house as virtue, scarcity as proof of worth. The 16520 predated all that and thus challenged it.
Breguet Ref. 3807 Type XX Aeronavale
The Type XX 3807 belonged to the era when brands resurrected military vocabulary for civilian reassurance. Limited to 2000 pieces, it reflected the democratization of exclusivity: a controlled scarcity designed to evoke authenticity without the discomfort of actual constraint. Its Cal. 582, rooted in Lemania heritage, offered a reliable column-wheel architecture that rewarded long-term serviceability—one of the more enduring mechanical virtues in Breguet’s modern catalogue. The aesthetic equation was familiar: bi-directional bezel, tri-compax layout, luminous numerals—functional cues softened into lifestyle symbols. Legibility was strong, though more nostalgic than tactical. For collectors, appreciation often stemmed less from its limited status than from its place in the 1990s revival of pilot-tool romanticism. It reminded us that utility became desirable precisely when it was no longer needed, a paradox that still animated much of modern collecting.
Longines Ref. 5681 Flyback Chronograph
The Longines 12.68z flyback represented a disappearing category: the modestly sized, mechanically ambitious tool watch built before luxury hardened into posture. Its mid-century proportions—restrained case diameter, svelte lugs, clean numerals—prioritized clarity without erasure. The 12.68z movement was historically meaningful: Longines had been one of the few manufacturers producing true in-house flyback chronographs in the 1940s–50s, and this technical self-sufficiency anchored the reference in a lineage now widely admired. Repairability relied on watchmakers versed in vintage chronograph calibers, but parts scarcity was mitigated by the movement’s relative simplicity and the persistence of donor watches. Collectors responded to pieces like this not through the lens of hype but through the quieter impulse to preserve industrial memory. It was a chronograph from a time when functional sophistication arrived without the need for narrative embellishment.
Swatch Diaphane One
The Diaphane One was one of the early 2000s’ most subversive gestures: a tourbillon rendered in translucent plastic. Cal. ETA A93.001’s carousel architecture rotated the entire regulating assembly once per minute, turning mechanical virtuosity into a visual theatre normally reserved for haute horlogerie. Yet its casing—plastic blended with aluminium—undercut the weight of tradition, inviting a more playful reading of complication. Legibility was intentionally secondary; the watch existed as a kinetic sculpture rather than a timing instrument. Repairability, while possible, required specialists familiar with the limited-production movement; the challenge lay less in mechanics than in the unconventional case materials. For collectors, its appeal lay in its philosophical provocation: if complication was about delight rather than hierarchy, why must materials be precious? The Diaphane One remained a reminder that innovation often emerged from irreverence.
Synthesis
Considered together, these five watches charted the shifting emotional economies of collecting. The Longines spoke to an older ethic: mechanical legitimacy as quiet competence. The Breguet and GP reflected the 1990s urge to reconstruct meaning through association—military heritage, automotive glamour—at a time when mechanical horology was rebuilding its cultural footing. The Rolex revealed the pre-modern moment when the industry still lived in a collaborative ecosystem rather than behind fortified walls of “purity.” And the Swatch, with its tourbillon-in-plastic audacity, hinted that the early 2000s briefly believed in democratized horological joy.
The pattern was not chronological progress but oscillation: between sincerity and performance, between authenticity and spectacle, between function and theatre. Preservation economics lurked underneath. Vintage Longines endured because its construction invited stewardship, while limited-edition 1990s pieces depended on narrative longevity. Rolex persisted because scarcity had been retroactively applied to a once-ordinary watch. Swatch’s survival depended on collectors embracing whimsy alongside reverence.
Ultimately, these five pieces proposed that value and values rarely aligned. What survived was not always what had been intended to matter; what mattered was often what revealed the contradictions we preferred to ignore.
Editorial
Auction catalogues often disguised themselves as markets, but they were better understood as mirrors. These five watches—uneven, unrelated, yet unexpectedly coherent—reminded us that collecting was not about assembling significance but about confronting the shifting terrain of taste itself. Mechanical timepieces survived not because they measured hours but because they measured our impulses: nostalgia, aspiration, skepticism, delight. In their coexistence, they posed the enduring WatchDossier question: what did our objects say about us when we stopped telling them what to mean?
About the Author
Sergio Galanti is an independent brand strategist and writer in the luxury watch industry. He is the editor of WatchDossier, a publication devoted to the cultural and philosophical undercurrents of modern horology.
No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.
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