Who Says A Summer Watch Has To Be A Sports Watch?

The minute that Memorial Day rolls around (at least here in the United States) watch writers immediately begin to sharpen their pencils for that great staple of summertime watch reporting: listicles of “summer watches.” There is no shame in such a thing. For one thing, readers seem to like them. They are a part of the larger experience of summer and we all like dripping ice-cream cones, saltwater taffy, getting the kids out of our hair by shipping them off to camp, open fire hydrants, the eye-ball burn of ocean water or chlorinated pools – I think you get the picture. For another thing, watch writers like them because they are an easy-t0-tee-up formula that lets us get away from the keyboard a little early and begin washing away the heat of the day with an aperol spritz or so a little earlier than usual.

The tendency is for such lists to focus largely on sports watches and there is a good reason for that, too. Summer is a time when a lot of us like to beat the heat (which seems to get harder with every passing minute) by getting into the water, or at least, getting water-adjacent. Yachting (whatever that is) surfing, swimming, diving, and generally cavorting in the nearest convenient body of water you can find is undoubtedly a defining summer experience. But summer is also a time when the long days seems to encourage a sense that even if we’re working, the day has only just begun even at quitting time, and that weekends begin earlier than usual and end later than usual. Summer’s a time when we lean into leisure with a keen sense of entitlement and energy, and while a sports watch or a dive watch might fit the bill, there are other, more elegant and indeed more celebratory ways to dress your wrist for the most celebratory of seasons (sorry, December, but Christmas is a break in the winter doldrums, not a winter’s worth of joie de vivre).

The Worrying About Water Is Beneath Me Dress Watches From Cartier

It is perhaps one of the greatest ironies of horology that a watch named for the toughest-by-design piece of military hardware ever to strike dread into the hearts of the infantry – the Tank – is also considered nowadays to be a rather dainty piece of equipment, and one certainly better suited to the opera than to the beach. Whether or not you can wear a Tank, or one of Cartier’s many other 30 meter water resistant dress watches, to the beach rather than to a more formal and more fully attired occasion, depends to a large extent on where the beach is, or at least, where you wish the beach were located. It also depends to some extent on the Tank in question – it is not rational but a steel Tank Must automatic seems to ask for less coddling than a gold Tank LC, even though the water resistance is exactly the same.

The easy answer is that only a certified lunatic would wear a gold tank to the beach, but if the beach is, say, on the French Riviera, or the magical island of Capri, and you are getting around in a classic Riva runabout, then you are probably in a position to wear a gold Cartier dress watch, gleaming against your immaculately tanned forearm, with devil-may-care abandon. As a matter of fact, forget the Riviera, the island, and the Riva – if you want to make a splash in terms of style more than you want to make one in more than thirty meters of water, the unexpected elegance of a Cartier dress watch is the way to go. I’m not saying I would swim in one; salt water is bad for the strap. But if you want to feel a hell of a lot more sartorially ennobled than summer beachwear usually gets you, a Tank (for instance) will make even an afternoon off feel like an extended sabbatical.

Wear Anything From Patek Philippe That Isn’t A Nautilus To The Aspen Summer Music Festival

The Aspen Summer Music Festival runs this year from June 29th to August 30th and but the calendar is packed. For the summer season there are some 400 classical music events on the calendar, and it’s not just a venue for musical performances – it’s a school for young musicians as well, with a wide range of courses covering everything from conducting to classical guitar, and everything in between. For a highbrow immersion in the highly evolved and deeply rewarding music collectively known as “classical” and which is all about taking one of mankind’s most important cultural legacies and making it fresh, relevant, and exciting for generation after generation, I can’t think of anything more appropriate than a dress watch – a Calatrava for choice – from Patek Philippe, since, after all, you never really own one, et cetera and so forth.

There is no reason in particular to not wear a sports watch to a classical music festival but there is no particular reason to wear one, either, and I don’t know about you but if I’m a classical music maven and I’m going to be listening to some of the repertoire’s greatest hits, performed by some of music’s most promising young musicians, I’m not going to need or want a sports watch, I’m going to want something that speaks to the grace, precision, and timeless (haha, worked that in there) character of music which has stood the test of centuries and which remains as unforgettable and meaningful now as it was on the day it was first performed.

For any summer arts festival with a classical theme, you can’t go wrong with a Calatrava, vintage or modern, but if you don’t mind being a little on the noise, why not bring a repeater? Just don’t set it off in the middle of someone’s Bach violin sonata. Of course, there are all sorts of summer arts festivals, some of which offer fascinating opportunities for dressing against type – for instance …

Something Luminous From Lange Is Perfect Unexpected Burning Man Watch

Burning Man? You’ve all heard about it and some of you have probably gone, although it has evolved over the years from a band-of-outsiders-ish conclave of bohemians, into one of the planet’s biggest gathering points for influencers and the people who love them. However, it has truly been said that Burning Man is a place where the question is not Why, but Why Not, and the sheer variety of art installations, performances, and other events is enough to overwhelm even the most stimulation tolerant arts maven.

What it is not, however, is classical in orientation and given the combination of nocturnal vibe and the Rube Goldberg-esque approach that Burning Man takes towards art (there is a general theme every year – this year it’s Animalia, but the themes tend to more suggestions than strict guidelines, rather like the color themes at Only Watch) I’m thinking that the out-of-the-ordinary designs from A. Lange & Söhne would fit the bill to a T.

I don’t know if Lange would even remotely entertain the idea but the fact that something like Burning Man is on the face of it, completely antithetical to the stereotyped image most people have of Lange, is exactly what would make something like the Lange 1 Lumen an interesting watch to wear. I have always found ALS to have a certain deadpan oddity, and I mean that in a good way – we’ve all gotten used to the design of watches like the Lange 1 or the Zeitwerk but they are neither of them exactly conventional watches, and what better to wear to the most conventional of unconventional summer arts festivals than one of the world’s most unconventionally conventional watch designs?

Vacheron Constantin Is The Ideal Summer Vintage Car Concours Dress Watch

At the slight risk of irking Lange, who is a major presence at the the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este in Lake Como every year, I think that Vacheron Constantin makes some of the best watches to dress up your summer driving togs out of any watch company in existence (in my defense, I would like to make the feeble point, mea culpa to Lange, that the Concorso takes place towards the end of May and is therefore not de jure a summer vintage car show, although it may one de facto depending on whether or not you are the sort of person who is strict about only wearing white between Memorial Day and Labor Day). Of the three traditional Big Three Swiss luxury brands – Audemars Piguet, Patek Philippe, and Vacheron Constantin – and don’t come at me, I know that classification is a little out of date at this point – Vacheron has historically been the one that’s had the most air of insouciant dash and conviction in unusual designs, though of course, that’s a sweeping generalization with lots of exceptions (for instance, pretty much anything Gilbert Albert designed for Patek Philippe).

The great thing about vintage car design, especially in the pre-war years when streamlining was just starting to hit, was that not only was it a time of incredible experimentation in coachwork, it was also a time when cars were still enough of a rarity to make car makers pull out all the stops in terms of making a seamless continuum between overtly elegant design, and Vacheron has an overt elegance across its designs in the last hundred years which is not quite part of the spirit of either Patek or AP.

Patek is the icon of classic, conservative and often highly complicated watchmaking and Audemars has re-invented itself almost entirely in the last 20 years, as a company dominated by the Royal Oak and the Offshore, but Vacheron’s production – including watches like the Overseas, the vintage and modern 222s, as well as its idiosyncratic take on the design of complications – has a lot of the exuberance of the best of classic car design. By the way, yes, the Overseas is technically a sports watch but in this instance, it’s a match not because of its water resistance, but rather thanks to its sprezzatura. 

Sci-Fi Summer Blockbuster Watches

For all that the pendulum for watch tastes has been swinging back towards classic sizes and classic designs, there is such a fine line between classical and boring. There are however watch companies which are standard-bearers for thinking of the history of fine watchmaking and watch design as a point of departure rather than a point of arrival, and in many cases, the world of science fiction films, as well as superhero comics and films, provide a rich range of inspirations as well as opportunities to see just how close you can get to a recognized film intellectual property without calling the wrath of a multibillion dollar media franchise’s legal department down upon your head.

I personally love the fact – and I regret not mentioning it in our Only Watch coverage – that URWERK, which has for many years been one of my favorite out-there brands (although the very first URWERK is pretty classical-looking, come to think of it) is offering a shoulder high “Space Time Blade” digital clock, which is sort of what you would get if you made, I don’t know, a saber, but maybe with a blade made of light. Of course such a weapon would be absurdly dangerous to the user, you’d need some sort of force to control it before you could use it in a war among the stars.

Moving onward with discreet haste, MB&F has built an entire brand around an initial inspiration from the world of comics and science fiction and although the company has found inspiration in a wider range since the first Horological Machine came out, with its signature manga battleaxe winding rotor, there is no doubt that if you want a watch that is going to make you want to make speed-blur swishing noises when you put it on, MB&F is the place to go. And if any company makes a watch that looks more like something that Naboo or Alderaan royalty would have worn than De Bethune, I’d like to know who it is. These are none of them watches that you would necessarily wear to the beach or for a dip in the pool, but they are all watches from companies that offer you a chance to take a break from the everyday and have a little fun in life, and that’s kind of what celebrating summer is all about anyway.

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