Watch Collecting Eras (Inspired by TimeGeek's 'What is Vintage?' thread.)
It has come to my attention that there are no "eras" for watch collecting, at least not officially.
Comic books have golden age, silver age, etc. But the only thing that I ever seem to see concerning watches is whether or not the watch is "vintage." And there seems to be no consensus on the meaning of what constitutes vintage, either. (See @timegeek 's post https://www.watchcrunch.com/timegeek/posts/what-is-vintage-25523 for details.)
My thoughts on this are as follows:
Watch collectors ought to have some definable categories, probably based on year ranges, the framework of which would provide a suitable foundation for the discussion of watch collecting across well-known periods of times, i.e., watch collecting eras.
I am still a neophyte when it comes to watch collecting, but I have been doing a lot of reading lately, on all sorts of subjects which are relevant to the hobby. The first major division, in my mind, would be that of the Quartz Crisis. According to Wikipedia, the Quartz Crisis (or to some, the Quartz Revolution) began when Seiko unveiled the Astron quartz watch on December 25, 1969.
(Main article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_crisis)
According to the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), the word "vintage" can refer to a period of someone's best work, in terms of artistic endeavor. And mechanical watches are indeed works of artistry, because of the loving care with which they must be created.
It is my assertion that the advent of quartz technology challenged this notion, advocating accuracy over artistry. This caused a fundamental change in the perception of the watchmaking craft. And it created a new impetus among the mechanical watchmaking world; watchmakers began looking for ways to refine their mechanical movements, to make them more efficient, in an effort to "keep up" with quartz. (Even though there's no way, realistically, for a mechanical movement to do that.)
Thus, it is my proposal that the word vintage be used to describe any watch made on or before December 24, 1969. Because in the mind of those enthusiasts who disparage quartz technology, the pre-quartz days were the period of the watch industry's best work.
Everything after the advent of quartz technology should be referred to as modern. Or perhaps contemporary. Doing so would finally give watch collectors at least one major division to work with.
QUESTIONS:
- Do you agree or disagree? Why?
- Can you think of any other specific dates which could be used to form other sub-divisions in the timeline of watch collecting? Please share your thoughts and suggestions.
Thank you for taking the time to read this, and thanks in advance for your thoughts and comments.
Call me Chris! Faithful Christian / Devoted & Loving Husband / Proud Father / Scholarly Librarian / Avid Antiquarian Book Collector / Registered Armiger / Certified D&D Nerd / Watch & Clock Collector.
Just to point out that the quartz crisis actually took hold in the late 70s & early 80s. Quartz watches were initially very expensive & they only became a threat to the majority of the Swiss watch industry once the Japanese had figured out how they could make the movements very cheaply
Just to point out that the quartz crisis actually took hold in the late 70s & early 80s. Quartz watches were initially very expensive & they only became a threat to the majority of the Swiss watch industry once the Japanese had figured out how they could make the movements very cheaply
Yes, that is true with all new technologies, but I am aiming at specific dates that can be clearly defined. Do you know of any production dates of any early quartz watches which would have been considered affordable or even cheap?
There are a lot of suppositions at work here.
Vintage is a perfectly good term as generally understood. It refers to age. With age come certain assumptions and expectations. Twenty five years is plenty long.
Under your definition you can't have vintage quartz watches. But, clearly that is not true. We don't mark eras with technological innovations in that way. Without looking it up, when did most automobiles switch from carburetors to fuel injection? That was an important development but we did not denote it with its own era.
There is a bias against things from our era being considered vintage. I own a Pulsar and a Fossil from the 1980's. We are farther from 1985 than 1969 was from the end of WWII. Some of us have lived it so time has a different value.
Think about the term "modern" that you use. Already art and literature have moved on from "modern". "Modern" is now in the past in those fields. It is vintage.
Art Deco can do some work for us. Military or "military styling" is also useful. "Mid-Century Modern" is recognizeable. We already have the words to describe what we see.
There are a lot of suppositions at work here.
Vintage is a perfectly good term as generally understood. It refers to age. With age come certain assumptions and expectations. Twenty five years is plenty long.
Under your definition you can't have vintage quartz watches. But, clearly that is not true. We don't mark eras with technological innovations in that way. Without looking it up, when did most automobiles switch from carburetors to fuel injection? That was an important development but we did not denote it with its own era.
There is a bias against things from our era being considered vintage. I own a Pulsar and a Fossil from the 1980's. We are farther from 1985 than 1969 was from the end of WWII. Some of us have lived it so time has a different value.
Think about the term "modern" that you use. Already art and literature have moved on from "modern". "Modern" is now in the past in those fields. It is vintage.
Art Deco can do some work for us. Military or "military styling" is also useful. "Mid-Century Modern" is recognizeable. We already have the words to describe what we see.
You make some very good points here, my hat is off to you sir. I might have went off half-cocked. But then again, that's why I enlisted the community's opinions, so that we could get a real dialogue going, and hammer out some of these details.
You are correct in wanting to have the term vintage applied to quartz movements. I hadn't considered that. But I still think that the advent of the quartz movement should somehow play a role in the terminology.
In the book collecting world, antiquarian is defined as something which is 100 or more years old. Perhaps we should use that term in watchmaking as well. In about 3 years or so, the Oyster movement that Rolex is so proud of will officially be antiquarian. I think that's significant.
As for art and literature terms, modernism was a movement or school of thought, emerging from the late 19th / early 20th centuries, but despite this, the term "modern," though used within the name, is not limited solely to that movement. Modern still means the present day, or recent times. Back when that movement was gaining its impetus, its ideas were modern. And while the modernist movement did begin to age, and fall out of vogue, the term upon which its name was based was unaffected.
Art Deco and Mid-Cetury Modern mainly refer to architectural styles, and other visual arts which were produced while those styles were in their zenith, but I think you're correct in your assertion that they could be adopted for use in watch collecting as well.
If we were to invoke age in years, and make use of antiquarian, we would also be stuck with the term for a half-century, quinquagenarian, which is quite a mouthful. But perhaps age is truly the place to start, since it applies a numeric value?
😮:::Horrible realization:::😮 I myself, am a quinquagenarian! 🤣
This is very interesting.
I agree that we're confusing era and style here to a degree - "modern" architecture can mean both the international style and its derivatives that arose from the Bauhaus as well as the current era of architecture (post-modern and blobitecture styles for instance). However, that confusion is telling. Is style more important than era in watches. Art Deco pieces are still being made so do we just need to differentiate modern Deco for watches made recently, vintage Deco for those between WWII and 25 years ago and (say) period Deco for those from the 30s and 40s when discussing them? I hadn't really considered that.
Heck, I'm wearing a modern Bauhaus watch right now.
You might be onto something there. What if we were to adopt the terms period to refer to any watch manufactured in the time period when its style was still current, while homage could mean any watch manufactured in the modern age which has a style reminescent of a bygone era? e.g., the watch you mentioned would be a Bauhaus homage, etc.
I think vintage depends more when you were born.... I think of stuff from the 90s as vintage. The stuff made in the 60s and 70s is just plain ancient and belong in a archeological section of a museum. I definitely can appreciate the stuff made by hand, but the advancement of design and effort in technological knowledge cross platforming has made the newer watch making era to me the golden era now.
I was going to say that watches, like eyeglass frames, are fairly glacial in styling changes as they are expected to last a good while, people don't want too radical a change, and the form is largely dictated by function. But then it dawned on me that, perhaps because I'm not so academic on the topics, that vintage clothing and accessories are generally assigned a guesstimate of decade absent some transformational technology or social shift. All I can think of that applies to either of these are men starting to wear watches on wrist circa WW1 (though the shift took decades), the pin pallet and dollar watches, the proliferation of automatic winding (which is pretty irrelevant), the dive watch fad (oh to have the time machine to have prevented that!), the real advancements of various electronic forms, and fookin Stallone tricking decades of people into wearing big ugly watches.
Anyhow, we are absolutely in the post-quartz smartwatch era. Most here are in denial about this, but it's true. One can still buy a record player, but the vinyl age is long gone. Y'all are in layers of anachronism.