The dial was champagne-colored, with an unexpected circle of neon orange around the seconds’ subdial. Would I become one of them? I ducked into a Pakistani place to eat a quail, but was worried about splashing grease on the vegetable-tanned natural-leather strap. There is an entire genre of watch aficionados who take photos of themselves wearing their timepieces in front of landmarks and post them on watch forums. I took a photograph of the Minimatik on my wrist, as if at any moment I would be forced to give it back. The winner was a relatively new watchmaker called Nomos, based in the tiny Saxon town of Glashütte.Īn early-spring sun glinted off my watch as I walked down Lexington Avenue. After my panic attack on the subway, the urge for another Bauhaus-inspired watch had become overwhelming, and I compared many brands. The watch was the most beautiful object I had ever seen. Thrift was comforting material goods uninteresting, bordering on gauche.Īnd yet on April 12, 2016, I walked out of the Tourneau TimeMachine store, on Madison Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, with a receipt for $4,137.25 and a new Nomos Minimatik Champagner on my wrist, the sales clerks bidding me farewell with a cheerful cry of “Congratulations!” By the standards of luxury watches, the amount I spent was small indeed (an entry-level Rolex is about six thousand dollars), but by my own standards I had just thrown away a small chunk, roughly 4.3 writing days, of my independence. I have always tried to keep on hand enough cash to cover at least two years of expenses in case the public stops being interested in my work, while plowing the rest into low-cost index funds. An excerpt:īut by this time I thought of myself as a writer, and, for a writer, the money you make can be traded in for your creative independence, hence one is permanently building a rainy-day fund. There’s a nice mixture here of relatable obsessiveness and informative bits about the watch world (including a plug for Hodinkee). This week, The New Yorker has a great piece from novelist Gary Shteyngart, who writes about how he fell in love in watches in the midst of the current political turmoil. The piece is beautifully written, and covers an all too familiar topic – how we can get fixated on the smallest details of a niche subject and, at times, maybe spend more than we originally anticipated.
The interviews are fun and accessible, even for non-watch experts such as myself.
I got my start four years ago when I started watching Hodinkee’s video series, “Talking Watches” ( this episode with John Goldberger remains a favorite). If you’re interested in clothes, it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump away from being interested in watches.
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