Fashion Watches Can Have Heritage Too (but only if they lean into it…)

When we think of fashion watches, we immediately conjur up images of the $100 “gold” Michael Kors watch your friends might have worn to their high school prom (and that they kept afterwards). And frankly, a lot of their designs are downright bad, there’s no getting around that. Most of their automatic offerings are usually skeletonized, use a very standard movement, and are even more uncharged than their quartz counterparts. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

In the early 20th Century, Abercrombie & Fitch was one of the leading department stores in the country, with a special watch division helmed by a young Jack Heuer. Heuer would put his heart and soul into his designs for the company, but eventually they would shutter the watch line entirely, citing low sales. Heuer eventually went on to form his own brand, but in modern times those vintage A&F watches have become the most in-demand and collectible vintage pieces one can find.

While the Abercrombie of today is unrecognizable from the Fitch of yesteryear, brands should lean into their heritage to inspire a new generation of watch enthusiasts.

For A&F a modern watch for them may look something like a Fossil watch, most likely quartz, but what would set it apart are the vintage inspired colors from examples like the photo above. Even in the 1940’s a lot of the design cues Heuer was using for A&F were ahead of its time. But the A&F discussion could be an entire article on its own considering how the brand’s image has evolved over the decades, so getting into the fast fashion watch business is not suitable for them.

This brings us to the elephant in the room, the Fossil Group. Fossil started off in the 80’s making 40’s and 50’s style watches for cheap. They were vintage styled long before the whole vintage craze took off. They maintained that design language well into the early 2010’s where somewhere around that time they began to transition to a midcentury modern look, but one that lacked the DNA of what makes something vintage inspired.

Take this quartz moonphase for example, if there wasn’t the Fossil name on the dial what would you have mistaken this for? JLC, Hamilton, Elgin perhaps? It’s not a bad looking watch, and you might even fool a couple of older folks into thinking it’s way older than it is (re: dupe].

I’m also impartial to Fossil because my first watch was an automatic one that had lost its luster and had the vintage look. I wanted it because it looked way older than what it was (from my 15 year old perspective).

All of this is to say, is that if these brands recognize their own heritage and not be afraid of it, then they could definitely reach a larger audience of having a modern vintage inspired watch at a reasonable price point. Because let’s face it, while it may be cool to own the $17 million Paul Newman grail, it doesn’t hurt the Paul Newman Daytona that some watches could take inspiration from its weathered design and ubiquitous history.