Understated, well-designed, reasonably priced, and still sufficiently luxe to catch the eye.

WORDS TROY C. MEDINA

Let’s make one thing clear: You are not James Bond. You can buy a perfectly good 007 model from those fine watchmakers at Omega that looks just like the watch James Bond wore in the movies. But (spoiler alert) it won’t explode and kill a roomful of baddies, if that’s what you’re actually looking for. So don’t go around threatening supervillains thinking your watch will save you in the end.

This is not to say that Omega’s link to the Bond franchise is the only example of watch marketing getting a little ahead of reality. Not by a long shot. All modern watches come with a healthy dose of make-believe. I can guarantee you that no one is really going to take that Rolex Sea-Dweller 4000 anywhere near its depth rating. How often does that NOMOS Weltzeit fly across time zones anyway? (no, that weekend you spent at Hong Kong Disneyland doesn’t count). And oh my God, you’re wearing an IWC Pilot Chronograph Top Gun! You must fly aircraft carrier missions on an F/A-18!

You don’t? No, I didn’t think so.

My brief here isn’t to puncture the pretensions of every Walter Mitty who lives vicariously through his watch (and market data do confirm that it’s usually men – watchmakers market women’s timepieces a bit differently, with lots of gold and sparkly jewels, and hardly an aircraft carrier in sight). Life would be dull indeed without a bit of fantasy. Far be it for me to deny you the considerable vintage pleasures of the NASA-certified hand-wound Omega Speedmaster Professional Moon Watch with period-authentic acrylic crystal, without which Apollo 13’s astronauts might still be floating around in orbit today, and which still comes in handy for keeping you awake in 2016 as you time your transit through the duller expanses of SCTEX.

Instead, I’m trying to make a reasoned argument for the quietly capable gentleman’s watch—understated, well-designed, reasonably priced, and still sufficiently luxe to catch the eye, attracting the admiration of Random People Whose Opinions Somehow Matter, but also competent enough to get you through a tough, even life-endangering situation, should you ever find yourself in one.

First, a few personal guidelines. Yours may vary, but this is where my reasoning took me:

1. The smaller the watch, the more clever the engineering needed to fit all that complexity in a smaller space. The lower limit for diameters of gentlemen’s watches used to be somewhere around 35-38 mm, but this rule started going out of fashion one or two decades ago; mainstream watches are now comfortably within the 40mm range, some even in the high 40s, placing them in what I like to call the overcompensating zone.

2. Good reasons to make a watch larger: Visibility. Robustness—in diver’s watches, bigger cases mean more water resistance. Authenticity, especially for aviator timepieces, which used to be built around massive pocket watch movements. The ability (if shockproof)  to double as a blunt instrument for killing prey on the desert island you’re stranded on. In the greater scheme of things, fashion considerations aren’t anywhere near as important.

3. If your watch must invoke military associations, make sure the military whose spirit you’re summoning is a SUCCESSFUL one. Like, say, the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain (IWC Spitfire Chronograph), the German counterterrorism unit GSG-9 (Sinn UX), or even dare I say the Luftwaffe, if you’re willing to overlook the unfortunate Nazi unpleasantness (various vintage-styled German beobachtungsuhren from IWC, Fortis, Archimede and more).

4. My apologies in advance to fans of Panerai, whose guiding spirit is the Italian Navy, best known for A. sending frogmen on little torpedo-like submersibles to blow stuff up, a truly hapless way of waging naval warfare and; B. running away from confrontations with the Royal Navy, which was, it goes without saying, Commander Bond’s old outfit.

5. The caveat is that some military units are overexposed on the watch marketing front, like the Navy SEALs. You cannot swing a dead cat without hitting some mall-retailed watch claiming an association with them. What SEALs actually wear is another question (G-Shocks, Timexes and Suuntos, apparently).

6. If you’re the least bit interested in honoring tradition, mechanical watches are the way to go. They’re what your grandfather wore, they’re what every man who wanted a watch used to wear, before quartz nearly killed off the Swiss watchmaking industry in the 1970s. It follows that the technology is basically obsolete—no one actually buys mechanicals for their accuracy these days. Think about them as a bit of jewelry for the wrist that evokes history and keeps many charming Swiss mountain villages from starvation, which if allowed to happen would leave the world a sadder place. They can’t all go to the Vatican to become the Pope’s mercenaries, you know.

Now, on to the watches.

THE SAFE BETS

Rolex Explorer The watch Sir Edmund Hilary wore to summit Everest! Well, he wasn’t “Sir” Edmund yet until after the expedition of course, and his watch wasn’t the called the “Explorer” at the time—it was actually a Rolex Oyster Perpetual, which became the ancestor of the modern Explorer, Rolex’s entry-level sports watch and, at 39mm, one of its most understated. It’s safe to say it can probably climb Mount Pulag without even breathing hard.

Jaeger-Le Coultre Reverso Developed for polo-playing British officers in India! Featuring the signature swiveling case that protects the dial from unfortunate impacts with polo mallets or (in the absolute worst case) pony hooves. Little-changed in its hand-wound form since the 1930s, though automatic versions are becoming more widely available. You can’t get any more discreet than a watch you can hide – behind a tastefully-engraved steel back, of course.

 

Tudor Pelagos manufacture Now with a new in-house movement! Don’t call it a comeback, but this watch represents some of the new thinking at resurgent Tudor, Rolex’s sister brand. Rated to 500 meters underwater and 70 hours’ endurance, the Pelagos features a tough titanium case  and the option of a stunning matte blue dial that was all the rage in 2015 and is slowly becoming more available in Asia.

 

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING A LTTLE MORE TEUTONIC

Sinn 556i The entry-level minimalist masterpiece! With a glossy black dial and no unnecessary elements – only the hour and minute markers, altimeter-inspired hands (Sinn was founded by a pilot), a date window, the Sinn brand, and the words “Automatik” and “Made in Germany.” That is all. Not strictly a dive watch but rated to a depth of 200 meters, it’s more capable that you need it to be, in a neat little 38mm package. Spend a little more and you get Sinn’s higher-end models, including some made with the actual steel used in German submarines. If your want your watch with Arabic numerals, the Sinn 556a variant is also excellent value.

Montblanc Heritage Spirit Moonphase 38mm The German pen maker that sounds Swiss! It’s not well known that Montblanc is German, much less a watch brand, but it is, in fact, based in Hamburg, and builds its watches in Switzerland. The company has one serious strike against it – people widely consider it to be a fashion accessories house, and not among the top tier of watchmakers. However, it did hire its most senior watch executive away from Jaeger Le-Coultre a few years ago, and he is said to have installed a testing regime in line with Jaeger’s rigorous 1,000 Hours Control program. That makes Montblanc an up-and-comer to keep an eye on, and its reasonably-priced moon phase watch (in steel) fits the bill for when you have to wear something formal while fending off multiple villains, including members of your own executive board. A 41mm version is also available.

QUIRKY STYLING FOR ASPIRING X-MEN

Anti-Magnetic Watches Let’s face it: very few of us are divers and hardly any of us are pilots. But most of us live next to electrical devices, which generate magnetic fields that can disrupt the workings of mechanical watch movements. More to the point, our world is now run by geeks at the head of massive technology corporations; even James Bond has his Quartermaster. I’m trying to make the case here that the ultimate quietly-capable watch for brainy people, or those who would like to be seen as such, is the anti-magnetic timepiece, the most famous example of which (the Milgauss) was designed for nuclear scientists at CERN. CERN!

Rolex Milgauss The nerdiest member of the Rolex family, with unusual colors for a Rolex and the signature lightning-bolt seconds hand that screams “individualist,” even while enclosed within a fairly sedate 40mm package. As the name suggests, it was designed to withstand 1,000 gauss, and was originally targeted at scientists, engineers, radiologists, and anyone else working near high-powered electrical equipment. At the heart of its technology is a charmingly old-school solution – a soft iron case that resists magnetism. The need to shield the movement means unnecessary openings, such as a date window or a display back, have been eliminated, making the argument for the Milgauss as an austere, function-only minimalist classic.

Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra > 15,000 Gauss That “>15,000 Gauss” designation is formally part of the watch’s name, and represents an obvious bit of marketing one-upmanship aimed at Rolex, whose contender only protects up to 1,000 gauss after all. The current Aqua Terra line features a new movement that doesn’t need iron shielding because it uses proprietary and expensively-developed magnetism-resistant components. The lack of shielding means the Aqua Terra can look more like a normal weekend sport watch, with a sapphire crystal back and a date window, though the launch model did feature a yellow-and-black seconds hand as a not-so-subtle reminder of its anti-magnetic prowess. Which raises the question: does anyone really need 15,000 gauss worth of protection? Probably not – unless you’re a superhero-in-the-making working quietly at the Large Hadron Collider waiting for a terrible electrical accident to transform your life’s mission.

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