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.
If there were a watch enthusiasts’ encyclopedia, under “embarrassment of riches” the image might just be a side-by-side shot two of contemporary watchmaking’s great complicated pieces: the “mighty” A. Lange & Söhne Double Split and Patek Philippe’s Reference 5370P split-second chronograph. In this article, GaryG compares and contrasts them to come out with a winner.
As a collector, and a fairly visible one at that, GaryG has been paying attention to reports of muggings and thefts of watches and wondering whether it makes sense these days to wear valuable pieces in public. He polled a group of 20 watch enthusiast friends on their personal safety while wearing watches to learn what steps they take to keep safe.
You can like everything, but you can’t buy – or keep – everything! Inevitably, the choices involved lead at times to regrets; for GaryG, along with many of his pals, the sadness is much more often about pieces they sold too soon or failed to buy rather than pieces they were sorry about buying in the first place. Here’s a story of shoulda, woulda, coulda.
The history of commissioned timepieces is a long and colorful one, but collector group commissions are perhaps a more recent phenomenon. GaryG recently met with Adam Eisendrath of San Francisco-based collectors 49 Crowns to learn more about the club and to check out two customized watches commissioned from Swiss-based Finnish independent Torsti Laine.