l'article du New York Time de ce jour à ce sujet !
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écrit par Xav le 24 mars 2002 15:32:05:
en réponse à: pas d'accord JOJO ! écrit par Xav le 24 mars 2002 15:06:13:
Grâce à jay Pulli de Paneristi.com
Vous verrez que c'est pile poil la synthèse de nos quelques derniers post
LPDM rules !
"
March 24, 2002
Telling Time Is Not Enough: Some Watches Stop Traffic
By WARREN ST. JOHN
SINCE buying his first high-end watch nearly 20 years ago, a stainless steel Cartier Vendôme, Burt Minkoff had considered himself a watch enthusiast of restrained taste.
He liked white faces and average-size casings – the kind that sit neatly atop the wrist without poking over the edge, the ones legible
at arm's length, but not much farther. Mr. Minkoff, a 46-year-old Miami real estate developer, was so certain of his preference for
understated timepieces that over the years he added five more Cartiers to his collection.But on a trip to Milan last year, Mr. Minkoff saw something truly weird, a gigantic Italian watch that resembled a kitchen timer with
a strap, the mother of jumbo watches: a Panerai Luminor."It was a big, huge monster-type thing," he said.
Back in the United States, Mr. Minkoff decided to buy one of those monster-type things. He dropped $3,600 on a Panerai. The
decision was not without consequences. After a few days of wearing his new jumbo, the delicate Cartiers no longer cut it."Every time I think about putting one of the others on, they feel too small," Mr. Minkoff said. "I used to shy away from big
watches. I called them Quarter-Pounders. Now I'm wearing a double Whopper with cheese."What began in the 1990's as a trend toward incrementally larger watches has turned into a mad dash among watch companies to
build the biggest timepiece and among consumers to strap it on. Inspired in part by the popularity of the upstart Panerai, traditional
companies like Corum, Franck Muller and Roger Dubuis have come out with jumbos of their own. Even Patek Philippe, the Swiss
watchmaker known for thin, elegant designs, recently came out with a 42-millimeter clunker. Stars like Sylvester Stallone and
Arnold Schwarzenegger have worn them in films, and trade and collect them."If I have one he doesn't have," Mr. Schwarzenegger said of Mr. Stallone, "I give it to him. And he does that for me."
The jumbo watch craze has touched off a testy debate among watch connoisseurs. On Internet bulletin boards, large watches –
generally, those with diameters of more than 40 millimeters – are derided as "hockey pucks," "dinner plates" and "Humvees for the
wrists." Even some of those responsible for the trend are wondering aloud about what they've wrought."I think it's going too far," said François Henry Bennahmias, the president of Audemars Piguet, the Swiss company credited by
some with creating the first jumbo, the Royal Oak Offshore. Audemars Piguet has produced jumbo watches for three of Mr.
Schwarzenegger's films. Even so, a 50-millimeter watch, Mr. Bennahmias said, "is beyond any possible acceptance from the wrist.
You need two Arnolds to wear a watch like this."Watchmakers, though, show no signs of letting up. At the annual Salon International Haute Horlogerie in Geneva in early April, the
International Watch Company plans to unveil a 46-millimeter watch. And at least one company has been formed specifically to
capitalize on the big-watch phenomenon. In December, a Rodeo Drive jeweler named Ali Soltani, who calls himself the "king of
monster watches," presented Ritmo Mundo, a line whose rectangular Grand Data stretches 52 millimeters lug to lug.According to Michael Friedberg, a lawyer and watch connoisseur who moderates Timezone.com, a watch aficionados' Web site,
"It's a question of how large can you go?"Watches occupy a singular role in the pantheon of male vanity. As the only piece of jewelry a man is likely to wear every day, a
watch provides his best opportunity to tell the world about himself without opening his mouth. A plastic Swatch says practicality.
Wearing a monstrous scuba watch with a suit is a way of announcing that despite the duds, you're not square. The oft-repeated
adage of watch salesmen is that you can drive a Ferrari to a restaurant and only the parking lot attendant will see it. A fine watch will
be seen by everyone.For decades, the trend was toward smaller watches. The thinner a watch casing, the thinking was, the finer the movement inside,
and the more expensive the watch. But as makers of inexpensive watches learned to replicate and mass-produce intricate movements,
it became difficult to discern fine watches from $19 knockoffs."You could wear a $20,000 Patek and there was a Seiko that looked just like it," said Steve Colky, the chief executive of a Los
Angeles electronics company and a watch collector with two Panerais.Enthusiasts looking for larger watches in the 1990's first turned to vintage military watches, which led to the rediscovery of Panerai,
a small Florentine company that made watches for the Italian and Egyptian navies in the 1940's and 1950's. Faced with the problem
of designing watches for divers to read underwater, the company had come up with a simple solution: it made its watches huge. The
big vintage Panerais began to fetch large sums at auction. The company's profile was heightened, it says, when Mr. Stallone ordered
200 custom models – "Slytechs" – to give to friends.In 1997, Panerai was bought by the Richemont Group, the luxury goods conglomerate that owns Dunhill, Cartier and Montblanc.
The company started making watches that resembled the Panerais of old. But perhaps more valuable even than the design,
Richemont acquired the Panerai story and all the marketing opportunities it provided. The new Panerai has turned out glossy
company histories, complete with reproductions of daguerreotypes showing the old family store.The watch quickly caught on in Europe. Then, in 2001, Ralph Lauren wore a Panerai in full-page ads that ran in American
magazines."I liked the design, the heritage," Mr. Lauren said. "I wouldn't be wearing a watch just because it was big. The companies that
knock it off are copying the size, but not the history of why it was that size."The appearance of the Panerai in the Ralph Lauren ads exposed the gargantuan watches to the masses in the United States.
"Customers were calling and saying, `I would like the watch Ralph Lauren was wearing,' " Philippe Bonay, the head of Panerai's
North American operation, said.Since then, Panerai's chief marketing trick has been to tell people they can't have one. Production is limited and each watch is
numbered, like a lithograph. As the company is quick to tell, even its own dealers are agitating for more product."If you come to Rodeo Drive, you'll see an empty Panerai case," said Jonas Grunberg, an executive at Princess Jewels Collection, a
Panerai dealer in Beverly Hills. Mr. Grunberg has a few Panerais in the safe. "But unless you are `the man,' " he said, "I'm not
going to pull them for you."While the strategy may have preserved Panerai's cachet, it opened doors for other watchmakers to capitalize on the phenomenon.
"Two years ago a slew of watches started to appear that were larger than 40 millimeters," said Joe Thompson, who writes about the
industry for WatchTime magazine and who coined the term Panerai syndrome to describe the obsession with jumbo watches. "Then
last year, the 50-millimeter barrier was broken."While some men say they like large watches because they are easy to read, most, if pressed, will admit that the real kick comes from
all the attention the hubcaps with hands generate."It's like when you're a kid and someone came to school with a new Hot Wheels," said Chi McBride, who plays the principal on
"Boston Public" and is the owner of four Panerais. "Everyone stands around looking at it, waiting for it to do something. Guys get
all gushy about a big watch. It's a manly man thing."For the archetypal manly man, big watches were a natural. "I am always interested in big things," Mr. Schwarzenegger said. "Big
motorcycles like Harley-Davidson, big furniture, big cars." When the jumbos took off, he wasn't surprised. "There is a huge
amount of people out there who dig big stuff," he said.To wear a big watch, though, certain logistical hurdles have to be cleared. "Sometimes it's hard to get your shirt cuff over the
watch," said Stephen Jacoby, a Manhattan publishing executive who owns a Panerai. At a recent fashion show in Milan, Ralph
Lauren wore his Panerai over the sleeve of a leather jacket."It wasn't ridiculous," Mr. Lauren said.
But the idea of a watch so big that it has to be strapped over clothing sends some traditionalists into fits.
"It becomes grotesque," said Thomas Mao, a collector who runs a connoisseurs' Web site, thePurists .com. "If the ends of the lug
extend beyond the edges of the wrist, that's the limit of aesthetic taste."Within the watch community, few think the trend will end anytime soon.
"Each generation gets bigger and wealthier and lives longer, and that forecasts larger wrists, weaker eyes and more money," Mr.
Thompson said. "The jumbo trend has legs."
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