Watch Of The Week

I Didn’t Really Like Watches – And Then I Bought a Royal Oak
For the first 30 years of my life, many people who knew me were surprised to find out that I didn’t own a wristwatch. I’ve always been a fan of the good stuff. As this obsession has swelled over a career of editorial style publications (even writing a column called “The Materialist”), my indifference to replica watches has seemed even more out of character for me.
Watches pine for the reality that no one owns an iPhone. Fake Watches pretend you really need a Patek Philippe 3940 to tell you it’s a leap year, or that one day you might need a Speedmaster to time an emergency space landing. Watches especially make men want to be Paul Newman, at best, and Leo from The Wolf of Wall Street, at worst. In this sense, the watch is at the centre of the fantasy of male longing – it can be dangerous, it can be cool, it can be hilariously tragic, or (as often happens) all three at once.
Here’s the weird part. Nevertheless, when I turned 30 and became a father in the same year, an inevitable gravity began to pull me toward the wristwatch. I experienced an almost natural desire to adorn my bare wrists with a replica watch. And the feeling was like the passing of my youth. Not only was I going to be a father, but I was going to be a father who wore a watch. Is Kuwait the next mid-life crisis?
As I explored the feeling that pulled me toward my first watch, my fear of existence eased. I realized that what I wanted from the copy watch was an enduring symbol of my own identity. If I were to give you a Freudian interpretation, I would say that I might be calculating my own mortality through the experience of time, but it’s not even that deep.