Modern watches - how will they age?
Looking at vintage watches with their patina, how do you think modern watches will look in 10, 20 years etc.
With a lot of ceramic dial dials around now I’d expect these to remain fairly unspoilt in terms of patina. But for other materials, would they age as they have in the past?
What about something like a new moon watch from today as an example. Would you expect that to develop a cream patina or are there new materials used that would keep it looking as it is now?
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Modern watches - how will they age?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Mick P
I see no attraction in patina, to me patina is another word for deterioration.
I agree wholeheartedly, patina to me is a way of making decay / decrepitude sound like positive attributes, wabi too.
Will they age? Not the lume, certainly not dramatically, ceramic, I just don’t know.
I think design choices may age very badly, particularly the current vogue for faux vintage, but that is an answer to a different question
Dave
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Modern watches - how will they age?
There's an initial appeal to clean and new, and there's an appeal to ageing gracefully, which is quite different to looking dented, worn out and water damaged, which has very little appeal and needs fixing.
Personally I find that brand new watches look a little too new and shiny, and they seem to improve over the course of a few years. Not due to picking up any noticeable scratches, but perhaps a very fine layer of wear takes the edge off them and gives them a glow. They look like they belong to the owner instead of the shop, and become a bit less loud and dare I say it, nouveau riche! Clearly today's watches should age well if well maintained, if anything they might start to look a bit better due to this wearing in process. But they'll go the same way as vintage watches if they're treated carelessly and scratched to pieces, left unserviced and taken for a swim with degraded seals.
A more interesting question for me is how they will look in a decade or two in design terms. 60s watches seem timeless, though that's perhaps an illusion based on how they appear to us in this decade, when mid-century design is popular. 70s can also look cool, or completely out there. 80s is often pretty ugly to today's eyes, and I've notice a lot of (mostly younger) people treating the 90s as if it was the prehistoric era, to be ironically revived and chuckled at, though to me it feels like yesterday.
The early 21st Century appears to me to be progressing more slowly in design terms than the 20th Century, with less extreme changes of direction between decades, but that could yet be proved wrong - our love of vintage is perhaps obscuring seismic shifts like the emergence of smart watches. I'm very interested to see how watches like the Rolex Sub and the Royal Oak look in a decade or three. It's hard to imagine us not still appreciating some designs that have stood the test of time so far. But I suspect that only a very few current watches are destined to be vintage classics in future, it's more likely that they will appear to be 'hilariously turn of the century'. It might even appear that our current era experienced a very strange fad for oversized, showy and oddly retro jewellery, that will go hugely out of fashion.
