Mad Money, Madder Timepieces At The Coachella Of Watches

At the other end of the Cartier conference table, someone has four rare watches I’m not yet allowed to talk about draped across their wrist and forearm. “That’s the shot,” one of the other journalists chortles as dozens of pics, professional and iPhone, are taken. The Cartier staffer presenting the house’s newest and most impressive pieces to the group, another whose job is to bring in the velvet-lined trays, and the publicist/sentry by the door choose to look amused.

This is but one of the many surreal scenes I participated in at Watches & Wonders, or the world’s fanciest trade show, where reporters, retailers, and VICs descended upon a windowless convention center near the Geneva airport to ogle the latest and greatest in timepieces. That dreamlike feeling might have been a symptom of jet lag or the setting’s disorienting Vegas-ness (the irony of being surrounded by clocks up the wazoo but not knowing what day it is), but it really was a fantasy — of handling art worth more than your take-home pay, of free Veuve, and of walking among the superrich doing their shopping with less concern than I might when considering a carton of eggs.

Not that you would really know it; here, the serious Patek collectors wear barn jackets or exercise kits like they’ve gone for a lakeside run and wandered into the Palexpo on a whim. Otherwise, aside from the Birkins you glimpse speed-walking past the booths of varying theatricality (Montblanc’s Wes Anderson chalet, Van Cleef & Arpels’ Parisian park), the only clue is the shopping bags, which are bigger than the freebies and sometimes carried by a besuited assistant trailing behind. But then again, you might also see a Prada Autumn/Winter 2012 geometric jacket or the czarevitch of a Jaeger LeCoultre-buying family dressed in a bow tie — and a mini Reverso.

My role in all this was to attend market appointments, during which I could occasionally touch and try on the merchandise while desperately coming up with new synonyms for “stunning” that befit the craftsmanship. I quickly learned that “complications” isn’t just an Interpol song and that no one, no matter how long they’ve been doing this, is very good at doing up the clasps. But perhaps the most entertaining practice is that some houses provide satiny branded gloves for you to wear to protect the goods, though their main usage seemed to be as photo props. Some other observations from my 15 meetings and tens of thousands of steps logged: Blue is the most prominent color trend, but the prettiest is dove gray; overwhelmingly, the nail polish shade was carnelian (not distracting if your hands are on display); some men are gravitating toward smaller watches, while women can still wear whatever sizes they want (though I do like the new mini Chanel J12 en bleu); and not everything is better encrusted in diamonds.

But for all the bejeweled planetarium automatons and the gratis canelés brought to you by servers straight out of central casting, not even the latest unprecedented times we’re living in could remain outside the heavily secured doors. While the real industry tea is saved for the brand dinners and the cigar-smoky Leopard Room at the Hotel d’Angleterre, I heard resigned grumbles of tariffs and gold prices, and the veteran watch journalists I drank with at our own hotel’s bar mostly agreed that this was a quieter year. And yet, even with the intrusion of reality, my first Watches & Wonders still seemed like a pleasant memory of the way things were.

For two days, I talked to people face to face for eight hours straight without dissociating because I simply did not have the time. I barely looked at my phone. I learned new words and etiquette and how another corner of the universe works. Like how it can’t be easy coming up with novelties annually, it’s also not so easy to find yourself in a new kind of experience. And W&W isn’t a party, a fashion show, or a gig — it’s its own unique event with its own specific set of rules. At times, it did feel a bit like the Roman Empire (right before its flop era), but what doesn’t these days? Mostly, it was weirdly funny and delirious and spectacular if you didn’t think too hard about it — which can’t be said about much else at the moment.

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