I always viewed watches as the only mainstream sociable acceptable form of male jewelry.
And regardless of which model, generally no more expensive than a woman's engagement or wedding ring, and actually usually cheaper.
Plus it does something other than look pretty - tells time & date!
But the article: it's repetitive and slightly rambling and reads like it was written by some variant of GPT.
The point is fair, but it's also well known to class watchers. In the UK nouveau means a gigantic new build mansion full of chrome and glass, a private gym, and plastic and dental surgery. Old means a small country estate, a Georgian pied-à-terre somewhere near the City, tweedy clothing, and perhaps some pedigree dogs. And horses.
Old money tends to underdress - sometimes sloppily - and on casual acquaintance is indistinguishable from the merely middle class.
It's not until you get an invite to the manor house that you discover the ridiculously impractical and expensive Aga stove, the collection of wildly expensive antiques whose prices are never mentioned [1], the relaxed air of charming quizzical bafflement. (Very few of these people are unusually bright or talented. But socially polished - yes.)
The visuals are not the point. Anyone can tweed, but not everyone can tweed like they've been doing it their entire lives and really mean it.
[1] A 17th century silver spoon for £5000? How fascinating!
If we're going down this line, why stop here? You forgot the 'trophy wife' which is definitely more prevalent than the dig at Musk/Bezos.
Cufflinks are a big deal, in certain circles.
Now we have iDweebs, those Apple ear things.
I don't know if this is true, but it makes a good story.
I don't even own any fake watches at this point and I've found these forums highly addictive/interesting - honestly, the average skill/knowledge level is quite high compared to most "watch enthusiast" forums.
First the maintenance. What is the probability those watches will still be serviceable in 50 years? I own a watch that’s more than 50 years and wear it regularly because it is still maintained by the company who made it.
Second the value holding. Sure you can sink your money in any gear. The special value of great mechanical watches is that they maintain their used value well on the second hand market for decades. An hommage will have little reputation of its own to maintain.
Of course this is all subject to special cases, but, etc because the watch world is very complex. For example many brands copy each other, some replica brand make great quality, and some great brands barely hold their value (which is a good thing for passionate collectors).
No doubt there is a great skilled and passionate community around reproduction, like in music or art. To build a replica you need way more skill than the average watch enthusiast. They rarely outskill the examples they copy still.
Sure, that's why you have to find the ones that do. The forums linked make this a trivial task.
Extremely high, given that they tend to run on clones of incredibly popular movements like the ETA2824.
(Not a Rolex immitation, but I'm wearing a JDM Casio Oceanus S100 which is all the watch that anyone would ever need.)
That is hilarious to me. A quick search is showing one can expect a POS Casio to be +/- 15 seconds per month.
In all honesty the salient points in the OP about judging instead of thinking, is a commonly attributed aphorism to Carl Jung yet there is no reference to it. The point about tardiness and drawbacks this apparently has on socialising and career progression comes across as utilitarian to the point of sounding sociopathic.
You're saying that wealthy people in France and Spain don't show it, and if they do they are commonly robbed?
Or maybe not. You mileage may vary.
This would depend a lot on how do you earned it.
It actually didn't work very well. I guess there's a hierarchy even among the fake.
Two weeks later the watch stopped running.
Around the same time, though, my mom's youngest brother was driving on the cross-Bronx throughway, stopped to help somebody whose car was pulled over on the side of the road, and found the driver had been shot dead.
I don't get what this has too do with the fake rolex.
7/10 meme
Gomorrah opens with a description of Italian clothing manufacturing. As described there, the difference between a fake shirt and a real shirt is that they were made to the same specifications under one and the same contract, by different factories, and the real one got delivered faster than the fake one did. Only the first guy to deliver gets paid.
It's an interesting book. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250145031/
They also made a movie of it [0], I lived in Italy during the financial crisis and it had become commonplace to see large migrating Chinese coming from the North (likely illegal migrants in Milan's clothing factories) come to the central part of Italy looking for work on farms and restaurants. It was hard times as this was taking place as the large migration from N. Africa was happening and they were living in the parks and making the locals irate.
It all came to light when our resident cheese maker, who used to work in the fashion Industry, had to tell them in broken Mandarin that we were fully staffed and couldn't accommodate them, but to try elsewhere further South--a typical way to brush-off a problem as is the running theme with Gomorrah.
I soon realized how dirty the Fashion Industry was as the Zara scandal was ettin into full swing and the workers were taking to writing messages about not being paid for the garments they made [1] as the factories were in sweatshops in Xinjiang or Brazil.
I wouldn't all it interesting so much as it is sobering and eye opening to the perils of offshore manufacturing practices and Italy's fashion Industry was just one of many of these horrors; Foxxcon's electronic manufacturing reliant on African rare earth mine exploitation make all of this pale in comparison.
> That's Italy!
It's anywhere you want to see where manufacturing costs get pushed to be the smallest possible line-item/expense in a value chain; the US is notorious for using forced labour in prisons for these kind of things, too. It's sad because it is a common practice in the worst labour camps/prisons in Russia (Siberia). It's where Britney Griner was going to serve her sentence, which incidentally is also where the Nadya of Pussy Riot spent several years in and was very candid about what was awaiting for her there.
Took 4 weeks to arrive direct from China
Absolutely. Modern fake Rolexes can only be told apart from a real one by an expert examining it with a loupe. And 8 tick pr second isn't that hard to replicate. Several ETA and Sellita calibers do it as well.
There was a time, not that long time ago in which good clocks were expensive and expending 2ks on a good clock was similar to expending 2k on a laptop today, a functional, reasonable decision.
My uncle earned a much more expensive Rolex than 2k in a Golf tournament and wearing it nobody believed it was genuine, even a watchmaker could not differentiate it from sight, there are very good Chinese knockoffs for cheap anywhere.
Also, after quartz oscillator clocks, a 2k clock does not work better than a 100 one.
People spend their money on whatever they see fit. One of the great things of having money is having freedom in your life but few people knowing that you have it.
In places like Spain or France people do not admire you for having money, on the contrary they envy you, and you better not show off. Also gold diggers and interested parties like banks start to harass you all the time. And criminals what to take it from you by force.