The Fourth Wheel, Issue 4

The Collector Will See You Now

This Wednesday night I went to the VIP reception for the opening of the OAK Collection exhibition at the Design Museum, along with a really impressive number of watchmakers, collectors, brand managers, nearly every watch journalist in the western hemisphere and Peter Mandelson.¹ The exhibition comprises 168 of the rarest and best watches in existence, the majority from Patek Philippe, and is owned by French businessman Patrick Getriede.

Mr Getriede with a small percentage of his collection

Suffice to say, then, that if you’re into watches this is something you are going to be hearing an awful lot about this week. Hodinkee already published a video with Mr Getriede, which if you like reference numbers you will love, and social media is awash with pictures of the watches and the event. So I’ll try and keep this to a few personal thoughts, with a smattering of the more repeatable gossip from what felt like the best-attended watch event of the last three years.

Earlier in the day I had been at a press conference and preview of the exhibition. The exhibition itself is exactly as smartly presented as you’d expect. It’s not rocket science, as ‘curator’ Nick Foulkes (he renounced the label himself, I’m not being snide) explained: you get the watches at eye level, light them nicely and away you go. The more important act is to provide the right amount of information; when some of these watches could command whole articles to themselves, how do you do them justice in a museum? Foulkes, Geoffroy Ader and Patrick Getriede got this about spot on.

As for the watches themselves, what is there to say that hasn’t been said? Aurel Bacs said Getriede’s collection rates in the top five in the world; Thierry Stern described him as a latter-day Henry Graves. Every single one of them is a watch any watch collector would describe as the best in his or her collection, and Getriede has 600 others that are equally incredible. They are in brilliant condition, they all work (he has a full-time watchmaker) and apparently he wears them all. People who have pretty impressive watch collections by most standards - people like Ahmed “Shary” Rahman, for example - professed themselves in awe of the OAK Collection.

As a watch writer, it’s easy to overlook that these kind of watches generally aren’t seen anywhere. We’re lucky enough to be invited by brands, auction houses and retailers to see their archives, their latest products, their upcoming sales. We get to hold and even wear the unique metiers d’art creations, the rare vintage finds, and the un-buyable hype watches. I’ve got a photograph of the Paul Newman Paul Newman Daytona on my wrist. But most people, even most hardcore watch geeks, never actually see the objects of their geekdom. So bringing these kind of watches to a public gallery is actually pretty significant.

Reference 1579P - if you forced me to choose one, this would be it.

The whole enterprise does raise a few questions about the point of collecting, though. Until this point, Mr Getriede’s collection has lived in various storage facilities and free ports² around the world: a very private collection. He admitted in the press conference that most of his friends didn’t even know he was interested in watches and that his family, even, were not aware of the scale or significance of what he has amassed.

Nick Foulkes said, as he has elsewhere in the past, that a collection represents a self-portrait of the collector. It also represents a motivation. Every collection is brought together for a reason: maybe you’re obsessed with a certain type or brand of watch, or maybe you’re just looking to build your definition of a ‘perfect’ set of watches. Maybe your collection has a finite goal: ‘I will own every example of the Dufour Simplicity ever made’. The stated criteria of the OAK Collection are ‘quality, rarity and provenance’, but in person Mr Getriede surprised a few of us, I think, when he said simply that, “If I see a watch that I like, I will buy it.” He’s either got a phenomenal eye or is very well advised. Maybe it’s just the breezy reality of life with massive wealth that makes the acquisition of expensive watches as matter-of-fact as the socks I just ordered from Uniqlo.

Hands-down the standout moment of the press conference was, when impressing upon the audience that he cares just as much about buying new watches as vintage ones, Mr Getriede revealed that he placed orders for seven of Patek Philippe’s 12 new releases this year, and topped that by whipping a watch from his jacket pocket, proclaiming it to be a brand new minute repeater from Patek, one of only fifteen made, ‘and I love it just as much as my other watches’.

He certainly surprised me when he said that he wasn’t interested in the ‘thrill of the chase’ - when your passion involves buying that which is hard to find, I would have thought the finding would be the fun part. He obviously cares about the watches he has - you can see it in his eyes when he talks about them - but to hear him tell it, it was hard to understand which part of watch collecting actually drives him. Maybe it’s the gravitational pull of money; everyone around him is putting in the legwork and he performs the role that only he can; paying the bill.

Maybe Mr Getriede’s collection is the purest type of collection there is. Assembled just for him, on his terms, stored where only he knows the full extent of it and shared with no-one. Until now. Alongside his stated aim of elevating watches to the world of art, maybe there’s another reason to show it to the world: if a collection only exists behind closed doors, to what extent can it be said to exist at all? Is the point of a collection to be shared, to be shown? Does it not require witnessing, to validate its existence?

Does being in a gallery make something art? I’d say no. In fact, I argued here that watches are, by their nature, intrinsically not art, in the same way that cars or clothes aren’t art either: they may be beautiful, they may be unique, they may contain artistic decoration, but they are primarily functional objects, and art’s true purpose knows no other function but ‘to be art’.

There may be no right or wrong answer here. Certainly I’m sure many of you reading will see it differently. You probably will agree that the OAK Collection, as Bill Prince remarked as he introduced Mr Getriede and the exhibition’s curators, marks a turning point in how watches are seen in the world. If you haven’t already, I’d go to the Design Museum to make up your own mind: the OAK Collection is on display until next Thursday.

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I promised you gossip. In no particular order, and with respect to those who shared it and those whom it concerns, here you go.

• I’m told that at COMPANY NAME REDACTED FOR OBVIOUS REASONS there is a perfect storm brewing of mismanagement, scandal, embezzlement and loss-making, and that if you know where to look in the French-speaking Swiss press, the stories are there.

• According to someone in the know, the rare public speech made by Rolex CEO Jean-Frederique Dufour at Watches & Wonders - where he spoke of the need for the industry to be ‘more inclusive’ is being interpreted as a challenge to the FHH/Richemont to bring more brands under the same roof. ‘You want to be Baselworld, so be Baselworld’, as it was put to me. Interesting to see whether this pans out; it makes sense for the industry to have one annual hub. But W&W will struggle to get Swatch Group, AP, Richard Mille or Breitling on board; adding dozens of mid and low tier brands would be resisted by the existing players as diluting the event’s appeal, and the indie brands that aren’t currently involved are mostly staying out for financial reasons.

• On NFT’s - that’s a topic for another week - someone whose analysis I rate highly put it to me that there are going to be a few brands quietly cooling their enthusiasm in the coming months. What might it be about the association with arbitrarily-created value that could possibly worry the watch industry, we wondered…

• Lastly and more cheerfully, I ran into Kari Voutilainen - who if you didn’t read it, was the subject of last week’s newsletter. He was very optimistic about all things Urban Jurgensen, but said that under his own name, he’s fielding so many bespoke requests it’s actually stopping him making new series of models. Going to have to start saying ‘no’, Kari - and then we’ll see values start to shoot up, too.

Quick Links

1. The Watch Survey, at Esquire
   
   Esquire is running a Watch Survey, and if you take part you enter a prize draw to win £5,000 to spend at Watches of Switzerland. I’ve done it, so technically I guess I should be telling you all not to enter. But on behalf of my old colleagues, go on, give it a whirl.
   

2. The Time Museum of Tehran, at Watches by SJX
   
   “stucco from top to bottom”
   
   Since we were on the subject of watches and museums, a moment to mention this piece on a truly amazing building, which far outshines the watches and clocks within (although as the story explains, the exhibits aren’t aren’t even fully documented, so who knows what significant finds might be hiding there).

3. Karl Lagerfeld’s Royal Oak, by me at Mr Porter
   
   In what I might have to start calling ‘self-promotion corner’, this week I wrote about the significance of this very early foray into watch customisation. Again and again in watches, the seemingly superficial choice of colour is actually entirely dependent on technological progress; is it a coincidence that Lagerfeld happened to want his Royal Oak blacked-out at the exact time in history when that first became possible thanks to the invention of PVD? Hard to say. I’m currently reading The World According to Colour: A Cultural History by James Fox, and it’s made me realise how living in the age of Photoshop can make you blasé to the fact that manufacturing colour is still a fairly tricky business, and how recently in human history we became used to the idea of near-infinite choice.

4. The Audemars Piguet Star Wheel, at A Collected Man
   
   “The story goes back to the mid 17th century when the Pope was believed to have been struggling to sleep. Pope Alexander VII… was complaining to his trusted aide, Cardinal Barberini, that the tick-tocks of the clock in his living quarters in the Vatican – seemingly louder in the dead of the night – meant he could not get a wink of sleep. What was worse, he told Barberini, was that lying there awake, he could not even check the time in the dark.”
   
   Another piece I didn’t find space to mention before, this is a thorough and interesting read on a complication that although in wristwatches dates from the early 1990s, has its roots far further back.

5. £130,000 Richard Mille stolen from man in Oxford, BBC News
   
   It has been a grim joke in watch circles recently to hear collectors conclude discussion of their latest watch of interest with variations on the phrase “of course, you can’t wear that around here/out in public/in London, you’ll get your arm hacked off.” Luckily the owner of this RM wasn’t seriously harmed, but it seems to be broadly true - as public awareness of watches rises, crime is likely to do the same. That this took place in broad daylight on a Saturday lunchtime in one of Oxford’s busiest streets, less than two minutes walk from a police station, is still alarming. The CCTV images, for once, are pretty good - do share if you know people in the area.

6. TAG Heuer announces it will take payment in cryptocurrencies, at Business of Fashion (paywall)
   
   Noticed this story just as I was finishing up - it feels like eventually I’ll be giving you my magnum opus on all things blockchain-related, but my hot take here is: so what? People using currency to buy things; hold the front page. As more than one cynic in the Hodinkee comments observed, it doesn’t mean much if you assume TAG Heuer’s intention is to convert the coins to old-fashioned fiat money immediately. And you can bet that’s exactly what will happen. If M. Arnault wants to play the crypto markets he won’t be bothering to do so in increments of $3,000 at a time.

And finally…

Who said you can’t make a classy, restrained watch to celebrate the world of football?They were WRONG.

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1. He’s the chairman of the Design Museum, so it’s not really as weird as it sounds.

2. Controversial things, free ports. To be clear, I’m absolutely not implying Mr Getriede has had any involvement in any illegal activity of any kind, but if you’re wondering where you’ve seen them mentioned before, this is probably it.