Men used to mark time by bells. Now it is found on a phone screen. In between, it was carried in one’s pocket or worn on the wrist.
Over the past century, the visual cues of male identity—status, taste, aspiration—have narrowed. Once communicated through tailoring, ritual, and leisure possessions (horses, cigars, yachts), these signals have grown quieter. In the democratization of fashion and the casualization of daily life, men have lost much of their aesthetic vocabulary. With the exception of certain Mediterranean holdouts—where shirt buttons are open, wrists are gold, and ankles are bare—Western men no longer adorn themselves with visible status. In a world where suits are rare and shoes are synthetic, the last daily luxury object most men carry is a watch.
Phones, by contrast, are impersonal. Ubiquitous, fragile, and buried in pockets, they offer no distinction. Watches endure—and have become the single most visible way a man expresses his aesthetic sensibility and social self-understanding. A Rolex or Patek doesn’t just tell time. It tells a story: about who the wearer is, what he values, and what kind of world he believes he inhabits. The rise of glossy watch magazines, the decline of men’s fashion spreads in general-interest outlets like The Economist, and the explosion of online watch forums all signal this shift. Watches have become the last acceptable masculine jewel.
But watches are not only aesthetic—they are metaphysical. Timekeeping itself is an act of will. The first mechanical clocks were theological instruments: monastic communities devised them to structure prayer and labour, drawing the rhythms of nature into sacred order. The bell tower was not just a tool, but a symbol—calling a village to unity, dividing the sacred from the secular. From tower to pocket to wrist, time became increasingly personal. The wristwatch, though now standard, is a modern invention—popularized during the World Wars, when soldiers needed quick-glance precision under fire. The move from collective time (bells, factory whistles) to private time (wrist-bound seconds) mirrored the larger transition to a globalized, synchronized modernity.
‘And yet, for all our precision, we remain drawn to the imprecise’
Time once varied by town. Now it’s the same from Tokyo to Toronto. Local anomalies remain—Oxford’s Tom Tower famously rings five minutes behind Greenwich—but such quirks are now ceremonial. What matters is coordination. The more people share a standard, the more being on time becomes not just practical, but moral. The minute replaces the hour as the unit of order. Time becomes not just measurable, but standardized—mechanical, efficient, relentless.
And yet, for all our precision, we remain drawn to the imprecise. The quartz revolution of the 1970s introduced watches of astonishing accuracy. Quartz watches use an oscillating crystal—32,768 vibrations per second—to regulate time electronically. They are exponentially more accurate than mechanical watches and require almost no maintenance. Yet many still prefer the older kind. Digital watches may keep better time, but they feel cold—disembodied, frictionless. Men want a watch that moves. They want gears that resist the turn, hands that sweep the dial, a mechanism that ticks with something like a heartbeat.
This preference reveals something deeper. The modern affection for mechanical watches is not about function, but form. Not about precision, but presence. To wear a mechanical watch is to participate in a kind of discipline. Like handwriting a letter when a text would do, or lifting weights without steroids, it signals a desire to live with friction—to choose the slower, older, more human craft.
That choice opens a door. In a culture suspicious of traditional masculinity and allergic to beauty untinged by irony, men have few ways to express aesthetic judgment. To care too much about clothes risks being seen as unserious, affected, or coded. The result isn’t just sloppiness, but silence—a generation of men stripped of visual language. Watches offer a rare exception. In their world, taste is still allowed. Craft, proportion, heritage still matter. To know the difference between a manual wind and an automatic, to notice the lugs on a case or the brushing on a bracelet, is not to flaunt—but to care. And to care well is to recover a kind of masculine confidence: quiet, technical, precise.
‘The irony is that we now wear watches less to know the time than to say who we are’
In attending to watches, a man trains his eye—first for machinery, then for symmetry, weight, tone. He sees that elegance need not mean excess, that discretion can itself be a form of style. From there, he may start to think again about how his trousers break, how his jacket fits, what his shoes say. Fashion ceases to be a pose and becomes a practice—a visible form of discipline. The watch is no longer just the last allowable jewel. It becomes the first step toward a masculine poetics of dress.
The irony is that we now wear watches less to know the time than to say who we are. In an age where a phone tells better time than any Rolex, watches are thriving—not despite their obsolescence, but because of it. They are beautiful, technical, embodied objects in an abstract and disposable world. They are the final adornment, the last private ritual, the culture of time made visible—and kept close to the skin.
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