One of the great things about Portfolio magazine is that it has, so far, managed
to avoid any kind of feature article on the subject of high-end watches. Any
reader of high-end glossies aimed at rich businessmen is by this point intimately
familiar with the pornography of wristwear: objects which apparently transcend
their "watch" status to become "timepieces" in much the
same way as high-end apartments invariably become "residences". As
often as not these articles are written by Nick Foulkes, a man who I imagine
regularly dashing off a thousand words on different types of tourbillion before
breakfast.
Of course, these articles aren’t written to be read, they’re written to attract
advertising from watch manufacturers. And so they all have an astonishing sameness
to them: they wonder at craftmanship, they extoll technological prowess, they
explain that expensive watches are genuinely collectible and can often rise
in value over time. The one thing they never do is cast a remotely critical
eye on the industry.
And so we encounter the fact that this weekend, the Wall Street Journal ran
an 11-page
advertising section devoted to collecting and investing in luxury watches.
But it waited until Monday, after all those ads had run, to put on its front
page (not the Pursuits or Weekend sections, mind, where articles on
watches normally appear) an investigation of how Patek Philippe and other watchmakers
on their own product at auction in order to create the illusion that there’s
actually a secondary market for these things.
It’ll be interesting to see whether Patek Philippe stops advertising in the
WSJ as a result of this story. On the one hand, the paper has tarnished the
brand’s reputation. But on the other hand, it was careful to do so outside the
sections where buying watches is something worthy of feature-length examination
in and of itself. So long as such articles don’t appear directly opposite ads
for luxury watches, everything should be OK, no?