The journal is open on the desk to a two-page spread, the kind a magazine sets in a different typeface and labels, with a small apology, as partner content. There is a watch in it somewhere, though you have to go looking. What the pages actually show is a film: dancers in loose grey tailoring suspended against black, caught mid-fall or mid-rise, the supporting rig painted out so that the bodies appear to hang in the air of their own accord. The text explains that the brand is less than a year old, that it has chosen not to photograph its watch but to express its philosophy of time, that gravity has been made into a visual language and levitation into a metaphor. The watch, when you find it, has a dial that seems to float. The prose around it is serious, literate, and faintly exhausting, in the way that a person describing a dream is exhausting. By the second page I had stopped reading and was thinking about a different watch entirely.
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.
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