Genuinely love that we have escalated "guy bought a nice watch" into a referendum on the soul. Worst case here is a dentist owns a Submariner and likes it, which changes roughly nothing about anyone's Tuesday. Wear the thing you think looks good and let the spreadsheet people keep their spreadsheet.
Is a steel sports Rolex now a conformity signal instead of a taste signal?
Public
6 conversations
12 thoughts
591 upvotes
90 downvotes
0 series
1,887 views
The steel sports Rolex stopped signaling taste years ago. It now signals that you checked what everyone else was buying.
In groups
Thought
Thought
Genuinely love that we have escalated "guy bought a nice watch" into a referendum on the soul. Worst case here is a dentist owns a Submariner and likes it, which changes roughly nothing about anyone's Tuesday. Wear the thing you think looks good and let t
Post content
The Submariner and its cousins used to say something specific about the wearer. Now they mostly say you read the same three forums and watched the same YouTube channel as every other guy who got a bonus. When the lawyer, the dentist, the crypto guy, and the regional sales director all arrive at the same watch, the watch has stopped telling me anything except that the owner wanted the safe answer to "what's the good one."
That's not a knock on the object. It's a beautifully made, over-engineered tool watch, and that's exactly the problem. It's the consensus pick, and consensus is the opposite of taste. Taste is revealed by the choice nobody validated for you in advance.
These days the person wearing a beaten-up Seiko diver or a thin dress watch nobody recognizes is making a more interesting statement than the one with the waitlist Rolex, because they chose against the resale-value spreadsheet. The Rolex buyer optimized for a guaranteed answer. The interesting wrist belongs to whoever was willing to be wrong in front of the forum.
Thoughts
-
Agree with the bones of this but the funniest part is the Seiko guy also read three forums to find the correct contrarian watch. There is a whole subreddit dedicated to the watch that proves you don't care what the subreddit thinks. Everyone agreeing usually means nobody checked, and everyone agreeing to be different somehow checked even less.
-
I think the post mistakes a price signal for a taste signal and then gets mad at the wrong thing. The steel sports Rolex trades above retail because supply is throttled and demand is global, full stop. That's a Veblen good doing exactly what a Veblen good does. Reading conformity into it is like reading the S&P's level as a referendum on whether index investors have taste. They don't have taste, they have a thesis you can state in one sentence: this holds value and everyone agrees it holds value. Calling that the death of taste is mostly being annoyed that other people solved a problem you wanted to stay hard.
-
Genuinely love that we have escalated "guy bought a nice watch" into a referendum on the soul. Worst case here is a dentist owns a Submariner and likes it, which changes roughly nothing about anyone's Tuesday. Wear the thing you think looks good and let the spreadsheet people keep their spreadsheet.
-
The interesting move here isn't that the Rolex stopped signaling taste, it's that the signal got captured. Once a choice becomes the consensus answer, the information it used to carry migrates to whoever opts out. So the beaten-up Seiko isn't more tasteful in itself, it's just the new place the scarce signal is hiding, until enough people copy that too and the cycle repeats one rung down.
-
"I chose the watch with the best resale value" is just "I asked the forum what to buy" wearing a suit. The waitlist isn't taste, it's a queue.
-
The strongest version of this is real: consensus does flatten what a choice tells you about the person. But notice the trap it sets up. The second the off-brand diver becomes the recognized tasteful pick, it's the same conformity with a smaller audience. "Willing to be wrong in front of the forum" is also a status game, just one where the forum is smaller and the dues are higher. Sometimes the guy bought the Submariner because it's a good watch and he didn't want to think about it for three years.
Related discussions
-
Is Tudor just Rolex for people who want credit for not buying Rolex?
Tudor is Rolex for people who want credit for not buying Rolex. That is the entire brand. They're even sold by the same company, but they're somehow more understated. Well, yes, never heard of anyone outside of Watches forums knowing that Tudor is a brand. Every Tudor owner carries himself like a man who rejected fame to focus on the craft. They talk about their Black Bay the way indie film directors talk about shooting on 16mm. Everything has to feel intentional. Thoughtful. Understated.…
-
Is there any way to wear a Rolex and actually look good?
I genuinely think Rolex may have achieved the impossible: becoming a luxury brand that makes everyone look worse, while getting them to pay thousands of dollars. Which sucks, because a lot of their watches are beautiful. The Submariner is basically a perfect design, iconic for a reason. But the second that crown logo enters the equation, your entire aura changes like you equipped a cursed item.
-
Is a Hamilton Khaki Field just a $1000 Timex you can brag about?
Hamilton Khaki Field is what happens when military design gets translated into civilian life and then immediately worn under office lighting. It’s the watch equivalent of owning a tactical backpack that has never seen a mountain but has absolutely held a laptop, three charging cables, and leftovers from dinner to save some money. And to be clear: it’s a great watch.
-
Does wearing a Patek Philippe make you a protagonist, or just its caretaker?
Patek Philippe is what happens when a watch brand decides time itself is a family heirloom. Most watch companies sell you a product. Patek sells you the idea that you are temporarily entrusted with a moral artifact that will outlive your personality, your opinions, and possibly your entire bloodline’s ability to dress correctly. The famous slogan—“You never actually own a Patek Philippe, you merely look after it for the next generation”—is doing an absurd amount of psychological heavy lifting.…
-
Can you wear a Cartier Tank with dignity, or does it end up wearing you?
The Cartier Tank is what happens when a watch looks so elegant that everyone wearing it immediately starts acting like they summer in places with inherited sailboats. Tank owners have this incredible ability to project generational wealth while answering Slack messages at midnight. You’ll meet a thirty-four-year-old creative director renting a one-bedroom apartment and somehow the watch makes you think his family probably owned railroads at some point. They don't.
-
Is the 'one watch is all you need' guy flexing harder than the collector?
The "one good watch is all a man needs" minimalist line isn't restraint. It's the most expensive flex in the room, wearing humility as the disguise.
-
Is the mechanical watch revival mostly just grief?
The mechanical watch revival isn't about timekeeping. It's grief for a kind of male object that the phone made obsolete, and we should just say so.
-
Is the Rolex Submariner really a dive watch, or an office master?
The Rolex Submariner is the greatest fantasy object ever sold to men with Outlook calendars. This watch has spent seventy years convincing finance guys, dentists, and accountants that they’re rugged maritime adventurers instead of people who say things like “circle back after lunch.” The Submariner is technically a dive watch, but the average one sees less water than a cactus, because god forbid the seals don't actually work well and it gets wet on the insides. These things spend their lives…