Do you consider yourself a collector? For years GaryG resisted the label, however, he slowly tipped over into having, for lack of a better term, a watch collection. Here Gary shares what collecting means to him.
If cases get too little attention from watch collectors, GaryG feels that the straps and bracelets that turn a timepiece into a wristwatch seem to get even less. And of late, especially with the controversy surrounding the introduction of the “integrated” bracelet of A. Lange & Söhne’s Odysseus, he has been pondering metal watch bracelets and what makes them so special.
Can you imagine buying a watch bracelet and then searching for the right watch to pair with it? Seems a bit far fetched, but that’s exactly what a good friend of GaryG’s did a few years ago. And it led to him purchasing two beautiful 1815 Chronograph models from A. Lange & Söhne.
There are nice-looking watches, there are crisp-looking watches, and then there are watches that emanate an otherworldly glow. For GaryG the Rexhep Rexhepi/Akrivia Chronomètre Contemporain falls into the third category, so much so that it became a running joke for a friend to pantomime a “smelling salts” motion as a signal for Gary to pull up his sleeve and jolt him back to attention. Here he explains why he bought this new classic watch.
There are some watches you fall for the moment you see them. Sometimes that initial infatuation passes and you move on to the next temporary obsession, but then there are those instances in which the more you see, talk about, and learn about a piece and its origins the more you resolve to save up to buy one. For GaryG, the Grönefeld 1941 Remontoire was one of the latter.
Once upon a time, there was a watch enthusiast (GaryG) who admired the work of Max Büsser and his watchmaking enterprise MB&F and who dearly wanted to own one of his watches. But which one? Well, it took years, but Gary eventually decided on the eye-catching 2021 LM101 in white gold and here he explains why.
While GaryG thinks it’s all the more impressive that designers continue to delight us with new looks, many watches are often very similar. And trying to describe the slippery slope from vague resemblance to outright theft is not a simple task. So he begins down at the lower end of the grade with so-called homage watches and moves up the GaryG Styling Statute of Limitations from there.
A couple of years ago, GaryG wrote about one collector’s obsession with the A. Lange & Söhne Datograph Lumen and the platinum Lange bracelet made by Wellendorff, and wanting to combine the two. The result was spectacular, and now he brings us another view of it told through his own photographs.
It’s already time for the latest update in GaryG`s series of articles providing a completely subjective, unscientific, and unofficial history of watch photographs online. The big trend he has recently seen is the emergence of storytelling as a dominant theme in how watches are displayed. And while he lauds the rise to prominence of many more women among the population of online watch shooters and commentators, the emergence of boob shots with a watch hardly “empowers women” . . . or does it?
One of the best things about dealing with independent watchmakers is the ability to request unique touches on your watch. That’s just what happened after GaryG’s new friend first saw Kari Voutilainen’s Sport28, a titanium-encased watch that itself is quite rare with only eight examples made in total.