48 Hours at RollieFest with the World’s Top Watch Collectors

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The Temple of Dendur could be an amazing set for a catastrophe film, I’ve all the time thought. Maybe an asteroid hits the town. Or a Russian missile. The glass wall shatters, statues crack, historical past and modernity collide in a room constructed to air-condition antiquities. Tonight appears nearly as good an evening as any to finish all of it as a result of right here, in the midst of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are 209 of the world’s prime watch collectors, gooning over $15,000 Piagets, $20,000 Cartiers, $50,000 Patek Philippes, and $300,000 Rolexes.

It’s the welcome dinner for the biannual RollieFest, a two-day, invitation-only meet-up of horological fanatics, sellers, and influencers the place tickets value $1,500 apiece. Around me, grown males swig negronis and lock arms to snap group selfies with their watches. Rolex Submariners value $100,000 slide off furry wrists and get handed round like Eras Tour friendship bracelets. I feel, Comrade Mamdani could be appalled. Then once more, his mom labored with Rolex in 2004, so perhaps he has a smooth spot for the model.

Some of those males — and so they are largely males — are hobbyist collectors, guys with jobs like health-care government and monetary adviser who, once I ask what number of watches they personal, flash a glance of panic. “Is this for print?” one says. “Don’t tell my wife!” Others are very Shark Tank. Linden Lazarus (sure, that’s his actual identify) is 22 and owns a vintage-watch-reselling firm that was reportedly valued at $15 million in 2023. Mike Nouveau, a DJ turned TikTookay watchfluencer, proudly reveals me his 1967 Patek Philippe Calatrava that he values at $34,000. “The most special thing is that it’s a black dial, which kind of, like, triples the value of the entire watch because they made a lot of Calatravas with Champagne dials or silver dials. Black always boosts the price of any Patek,” he says. Like a purse snob rambling about her favourite Chloé Paddingtons and Gucci Jackies, Nouveau may inform me each final element in regards to the making and provenance of his {hardware}.

Watches have all the time supplied males the prospect to queen out about jewellery with out seeming too female. They are merchandise of advanced engineering, consisting of heavy metals and difficult equipment with a transparent, dispassionate performance, a butch toy solely different toy-havers can recognize. A watch man is prone to gather vehicles, too, one other phallic substitute to whip out on the grand urinal of comparative wealth. Vehicles and timepieces, each mechanical repositories for a sublimated natural lust: Look on the curves on that Porsche 911, the richness of the lapis dial on this Rolex Day-Date. Doesn’t that simply … flip you on?

For a very long time, the typical yuppie encountered an costly watch perhaps as soon as in a lifetime, maybe as an anniversary or a commencement present. But currently, Instagram is clogged with photos of Timothée Chalamet; Tyler, the Creator; and A$AP Rocky carrying classic watches, usually going rogue with girls’s fashions — a Cartier Tank right here, a metal Panthère there. An athlete with out an endorsement deal is uncommon; on the U.S. Open, each the lads’s and girls’s champions have been spoken for: Carlos Alcaraz by Rolex, Aryna Sabalenka by Audemars Piguet. Cross-market collaborations abound: Marni x G-Shock, Casio x A.P.C., Timex x Fortnite. Watches at the moment are one thing like a $60 billion-plus trade, bigger than the whole artwork market by some estimates, and public sale homes reminiscent of Sotheby’s, which is underwriting this dinner, have raced to cater to a beforehand untapped collector class. With artwork gross sales wavering this previous 12 months, luxurious items like watches and jewellery have been an sudden however useful lifeline for the commerce. And auctioneers preserve breaking information. In December, Phillips offered an F.P.Journe FFC prototype Francis Ford Coppola helped design for $10.8 million, greater than twice what his Megalopolis made in its opening weekend. The identical week, the Important Watches public sale at Sotheby’s totaled $42.8 million, led by the gathering of the late financier Robert M. Olmsted, a connoisseur who’d put aside Monday nights to personally wind each certainly one of his clocks and pocket watches.

Watching the uptick in reputation for fancy timepieces whereas gazing my bare, impoverished wrists, I’ve been mystified. How did the nerdiest and most prohibitively costly of hobbies break into the mainstream? A child Rolex — an Oyster Perpetual or a Datejust — would possibly run you $5,000 or $7,000. And even if you happen to had $200,000 to blow, you can not personally stroll right into a Rolex retailer and purchase a Daytona Le Mans, named for the French automobile race. Much like buying a Birkin, procuring one is usually a prolonged course of.

Not anybody can get in to RollieFest, both. “I cannot tell you how many people wanted to come to this. I was getting messages from strangers all over the world,” says Geoff Hess, the worldwide head of watches at Sotheby’s who conceived the occasion in 2019. He reserved these coveted 209 spots for folks he is aware of or follows on Instagram: “It has to be a trustworthy environment.” We don’t need our Le Mans fondled by Les Randoms. I provide that it’s form of like getting a golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate manufacturing unit. “It’s somewhere between Willy Wonka and La Cosa Nostra,” he says. “But no one gets whacked.”

The exclusivity, I understand, is a part of the gross sales pitch, together with the dad joke in regards to the mob. The males right here aren’t simply seeking to bro out collectively however to telegraph membership in a better caste, a form of Adventurers’ Club with out all of the animal poaching. “What’s amazing about this community is you’re not judged by the value of your collection,” Hess says. “No, you’re really judged by the stories and the narratives and the thrill of the hunt.” Better a Rollie than an endangered rhino, no?

The Rolliefest e-mail arrives in my inbox in September with the ominous warning “For everyone’s safety please DO NOT SHARE these details with anyone.” The top-secret itinerary is grueling: first, the gala dinner on the Met. The subsequent day, a “Watch Luncheon” at Aspire, the occasion area on the 102nd ground of One World Trade Center (“Please bring watches — all brands are welcome”). Finally, there’s a “Farewell Cocktail” on the Waldorf Astoria. Devoting one-third of a two-day schedule to saying goodbye appears dramatic, however then I understand that is most likely my one and solely RollieFest, and I really feel wistful on the considered parting methods with my soon-to-be pals.

What will I put on to the “Met Gala for Watch Collectors”? I determine on khaki cargo shorts and a white button-down with a crimson rockabilly tie, white socks, and brown penny loafers. I’m not carrying a watch as a result of I by no means put on a watch and now looks like the flawed time to begin pretending. I’m certain these captains of trade would scent a rat, anyway. As I enter the museum, I instantly remorse the selection of shorts. I’m at a gala! At the Met! And everyone seems to be in a swimsuit. I reek of poverty and inexperience, however I hope that reduces my menace degree as an intruder. Then once more, why would these males worry me? Or anybody? They’re wealthy sufficient to gather six-figure watches for enjoyable.

A publicist palms me a velvet-lined field with my credentials: a RollieFest canine tag with my identify engraved on it. We’re like Band of Brothers now, if the troopers have been all dweeby millionaires. For each tanned would-be Jack Donaghy right here, there are ten extra pasty, bespectacled nerds arguing problems (the issues a watch does in addition to inform time) and bezels (the rim across the dial). Despite the opulent setting, the temper within the Temple of Dendur reads high-school reunion: dads in off-the-rack Zegna and Adriano Goldschmied denims. Maybe as a result of I look about as menacing as Tintin on safari, everybody may be very excited to speak to me.

“This is a 1942 vintage Movado,” says Raymond Milnarik, displaying me the grail on his wrist, which he comfortably locations at $25,000. Milnarik, a marketing consultant, constructed his former enterprise by discovering classic watches with numerous “incorrect” elements — totally on eBay — which he then tweaked, or “corrected,” earlier than flipping them for a revenue. “I’m talking about vintage Caravelles, which is a subsidiary brand of Bulova, which I’m sure you’ve heard of.” I’ve not. “Caravelle is to Bulova as Tudor is to Rolex,” he clarifies. This additionally doesn’t assist. “I knew that the seconds hand right here on the sub-seconds register was incorrect. It’s pretty well documented that the running minute counter on these is supposed to have this squiggle. It looks like a snake, so you call them ‘snake hands’ …”

Everyone tells me I would like to satisfy Drew Coblitz, a 37-year-old collector and former race-car driver. From his Instagram, Coblitz seems to be each YouTube-addled tween’s fantasy of male maturity: Porsches, Rolexes, sun shades. He later tells me he owns eight or 9 vehicles — “mostly Porsches, one McLaren” — and between 20 and 25 watches, not less than half a dozen of that are “bigger-deal ones” ($50,000 or extra). In particular person, he reads extra Michael Cera than Jeff Bezos. “This 6239, this is the model that Paul Newman actually had, in this configuration,” Coblitz says, gesturing to the Rolex on the wrist of the man subsequent to us. He’s referring to a very prized Daytona mannequin from the ’60s as soon as owned by the late actor. Then, indicating the $400,000 Rolex on his personal wrist: “But this one came out a few years later and was one of the first ones that had an acrylic bezel.” He pauses. “Bakelite, actually. A Bakelite bezel.” He confesses, “I don’t remember what my serial number is, but it matches up with 1968.”

“Do people know their serial numbers off the top of their head?” I ask.

“I actually should know,” Coblitz replies virtually sheepishly. “That’s where I should be nerdier. But this is a ’68 and it lines up.”

As with any subculture, watch wonkery has a hierarchy. A yen for classic is a dividing line: There are the true believers who recognize each scratch and ding for the tales they inform, not simply the watch’s financial worth. And then there are the Johnny-come-latelies, revenue hounds who need to showcase their contemporary bling. COVID swelled the ranks of the latter. Bored wealthy folks have been parking their cash in tangible property, and watch auctions started breaking information. “A watch that was, say, worth $50,000 before the pandemic went up to $200,000. Another watch that was $70,000 went up to $250,000. It was nuts,” says Matthew Bain, a Miami-based seller. Outsiders smelled alternative and drove up the market, drawing complaints and derision from critical devotees who have been now priced out and surrounded by speculators.

“Honestly, it’s a bit disheartening to me,” I heard Kevin O’Dell, an Instagram watch seller, say the following day at a panel. “Back when we started, there was no such thing as ‘resale value.’ You would buy what kept you up at night.” Losing sleep over a Rolex “Paul Newman” 6263 Oyster Sotto RCO is a fantastic factor, as is the market value (someplace within the neighborhood of $1 million).

For the extra insider-y flex, there’s microbrand collectors. “Look, they’re beautiful watches, but it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to buy a Daytona. It requires money,” says Phil Toledano, proprietor of the impartial label Toledano & Chan. Over dinner, he reveals me his personal creation, a watch impressed by the brutalist home windows of the Breuer Building (now owned by Sotheby’s); it retails for $4,000 and might fetch $8,000 on the secondary market. To me, this pick-me bracelet is lacking the patina, the homoerotic minimalism of Eastern European housing blocs. It’s too new, too bulbous, too carlike. But a lot of the watches listed below are too carlike. The dominant silhouette for this crowd is a big-boy timepiece to go together with an excessively tight blazer and rubber-soled costume sneakers. It’s the other of Timothée and Tyler with their oversize suits and undersize Cartier Tanks and Dalí-esque Crashes, fashions that don’t equate standing with weight. (Zohran Mamdani subscribes to this anti-fat-cat aesthetic, too, even when his normal skinny Casio prices $160.) “Lots of cocktail watches were so undervalued for so long that you can still get good deals on them and you can wear them creatively,” says Brynn Wallner, the founding father of Dimepiece, a hub for woman watchists. “You’re a guy and you’re wearing your sterling-silver Tiffany bracelet and then you stack it with this cocktail watch? All of a sudden, you look like Jacob Elordi.” Suffice it to say, nobody right here seems to be like Jacob Elordi.

The rarest sight of all are feminine collectors. “I’m always in awe of any woman who shows up here because it’s Dungeons & Dragons–level nerdery,” says Toledano. The ones I discuss to are type-A shebosses working for public sale homes, in public relations, and for microbrands. They can categorical themselves in a manner the manifestly heterosexual males merely can’t and are doubtless carrying tiny cool-girl watches. Courtney Bachrach, a collector and marketing consultant, reveals me a snakelike Forties Cartier bracelet ($12,000 to $16,000) with 4 intertwined ropes of gold cradling a modest dial that feels essentially the most acceptable for this haunting Egyptian atrium.

Before the filet mignon and delicata squash arrive, I meet an influencer who goes by Old Watch Lady on Instagram — “Owl” to her followers. She doesn’t share her actual identify and, kinkily, posts solely wrist, no face. She has a blunt bob and tatted arms with three Rolexes on every wrist, all with gold bands and stone dials (what a civilian would possibly name the “face”) in jewel tones like jadeite, malachite, jasper, and coral. At a prime estimate of roughly $25,000 for a 26-mm. stone-dial Rolex in gold, Owl is likely to be carrying a mixed $150,000. If it’s potential to stay punk whereas drenched in six figures’ value of jewellery, she makes one of the best case for it. “People are going, ‘Oh my God, your watches are knocking against each other!’ ” She rolls her eyes. “I don’t care! I know fuck all about watches. I just know what I like. I’m nowhere near as anal as some of these guys.”

Maybe that’s the purpose. RollieFest is anti-cool. The solely celeb right here is the actor Fred Savage. Every branded occasion in New York nowadays is a variation on “Adidas x Bespoke Vodka Brand Invite You to Nepo’s Ceramics-Line Launch at Le Dinner Bistro.” But the watch guys are simply honest geeks who crave neighborhood. It’s candy. “Watches mark time,” Hess says from the rostrum. “But it’s moments like this that make time worth marking.” The corniness is a aid. There was nothing to be afraid of in any case. These guys by no means needed to reap my organs for adrenochrome. And they by no means noticed me as an intruder, both. They simply needed me to affix their membership.

The subsequent day, I squeeze previous vacationers within the foyer of One World Trade towards an indication studying ROLLIEFEST: MARINE BIOLOGY CONFERENCE, a twee little bit of misdirection for anybody planning a heist. Seeing my canine tag, a safety guard asks my opinion on the costliest watch upstairs. “Probably a Rolex,” I say. “Really?” he replies. “Not a Patek?”

At this level within the festivities, it’s dawned on me that I can not play the naïf with nude wrists. I go for not one however two watches, carrying them over my silky long-sleeved shirt, one on every arm. The first is an inexpensive quartz (battery operated) I purchased off the road, the second a barely extra spectacular Karl Lagerfeld–branded quartz with the letters Okay-A-R-L working from midday to three p.m. on the bezel. Don’t get too excited: The Karl retailed for one thing like $200 at Macy’s.

Ascending to the 102nd ground, I discover a sun-drenched horological bacchanal. An extended desk lined in Breguets, Rolexes, Patek Philippes, Audemars Piguets, and Universal Genèves stretches down the middle of the room. As if it’s a grown-up playdate, attendees carry their favourite LEGOs from dwelling, dump them on the desk, and depart to mingle. I method the bounty, working my unsupervised median-income paws over hundreds of thousands of {dollars}’ value of merchandise — gold, silver, diamond encrusted, leather-based banded, classic, indie, model new. Whoever owns the gems I’m sweating on merely doesn’t care. They’re amongst pals. They belief me now.

During the panel dialogue, softball questions are met with insider guffaws and pleasant chanting. At one level, a spontaneous “Phil! Phil! Phil!” breaks out with Toledano rising from his chair to wave to the viewers. When requested about who’s most fun to him, boy surprise Linden Lazarus shouts out “Vincent Brasesco,” one other watch-car overlapper, earlier than providing a Kamala-esque fugue of positivity: “It was remarkable coming into this event and seeing so many faces that I feel like I’ve known for so long, and we’re all rooting on for the furtherance of all of our journeys.” All journeys are legitimate at watch camp.

I ask everybody how a lot cash in watches is within the room. Guesses vary from $5 million to over $100 million. Hess suspects the determine is nearer to $40 million. Bachrach, the luxurious marketing consultant, reveals me one of many heavy hitters: a Rolex Daytona Le Mans, which she estimates goes for between $250,000 and $315,000. I caress it. It’s huge and gold. This one has a black dial, classier than the Champagne dial of Tony Soprano’s Day-Date, though, for my part, Tony’s cheesy gold was cooler.

Personally, I’m extra drawn to the navy fashions I see round me. Rolex, it seems, was the favored provider for Royal Air Force pilots in World War II as a result of the dials have been simple to learn within the air and the straps match over flight jackets. There are additionally dive watches, racing watches, subject watches. What’s sexiest about these kinds is that they have been as soon as engineered to accompany the noble pursuits of a masculine life. Now they’re purely ornamental. No one’s flying a fighter jet on this room. We don’t even want watches to inform time anymore.

As we end rooster and waffles which are one way or the other each soggy and dry, Bachrach brings out a Patek Philippe Calatrava 5296 (estimated worth is $30,000) with a clear case and visual shifting gears, a design characteristic of no sensible goal apart from to impress you with its expertise. I do know it’s a gimmick, like a glass-bottom boat, however it permits her to clarify to me with nice persistence how the machine winds itself, utilizing gravity and the motion of her personal wrist to coil up vitality, which is then regulated by a “balance spring” and launched by means of an “escapement,” somewhat notched wheel that ticks ahead in good rhythm, like in Wheel of Fortune. It is exceptional, particularly if you happen to think about the little Swiss maestro who made it, futzing away in his distant alpine lab.

The stability spring was invented within the 1670s, considerably rising the accuracy of pocket watches. In his diaries from the identical interval, the English civil servant Samuel Pepys described a fascination together with his then-newfangled piece of wearable tech that will ring acquainted to our trendy ears:

“Lord! to see how much of my old folly and childishnesse hangs upon me still that I cannot forbear carrying my watch in my hand in the coach all this afternoon, and seeing what o’clock it is 100 times; and am apt to think with myself, how could I be so long without one …”

Not me checking my telephone to see what o’clock it’s 100 instances a day! Maybe all neurotic males are hardwired to be into these items and we now have been for hundreds of years. It’s simply that now, in an period of turbocharged conspicuous consumption, we are able to channel this borderline-antisocial obsession with mechanical arcana into gizmos value upwards of tens of hundreds of {dollars}. Well, not all of us. Per week later, I e-mail Milnarik, the previous flipper, a temper board of watches I like and ask if he has any suggestions for a virgin with a tiny pockets. He responds the very subsequent day, sending a hyperlink to a personal Connecticut-based seller promoting a $900 U.S. navy–problem subject watch from the primary Gulf War. Frankly, I really like the political intrigue and the uncooked masculinity urged by the dial’s faint nicks. But I worry my price range is extra within the vary of Mamdani’s Casio.

At the newly renovated Waldorf Astoria later that evening, I repeat my over-the-sleeve search for goodbye drinks. Under lighting vibrant sufficient to conduct surgical procedure, I knock again two old-fashioneds whereas everybody gleefully swaps extra loot. Some man lays out a dozen or so watches on a espresso desk, all wrapped in plastic. Deals are being hatched. The clock, in any case, is ticking. For all of the greenback indicators, the rampant acquisitiveness, the horse-trading, there may be an emotional present coiled up within the stability spring. Watches make these folks really feel one thing — one thing nostalgic, a connection not simply to an apocryphal previous however to their very own childhood. Bachrach tells me certainly one of her fondest recollections as a lady is visiting classic sellers in London along with her father, gazing wide-eyed at Nineteen Twenties Art Deco cocktail watches. “We’d call them ‘princess watches,’ ” she says. For her twenty first birthday, he gave her a Rolex Daytona 116505 in Everose with an ivory dial. As I get misty-eyed, I run into Fred Savage.

“Whether you’re buying, you know, a watch of military provenance or whether you’re buying an aviator watch or an astronaut’s watch or a TAG Heuer because of its racing heritage, it’s all a costume you put on,” he says. “And I think that’s one of the most natural things since we were little children: We put our feet in our dad’s shoes. Or it’s wearing our mom’s jewelry. That was part of feeling close to them. It was part of being a grown-up.”

It was surreal to listen to this icon of nostalgia summarize the human need for familial cosplay. As a baby, I watched The Wonder Years with my father as a result of it was how I imagined his childhood. It allowed us to satisfy within the current. Maybe the proverbial watch is all the time the daddy’s and carrying it locations us within the awestruck, hopeful thoughts of somebody who nonetheless thinks of adults as heroes. Suddenly, I’m 9 years previous once more. I’m in my mother’s closet, drowning in her bejeweled Escada blazer, slipping into her leather-based pumps. I suppose it’s the identical feeling for the watch nerds. Perhaps it’s the heaviest of watches, these huge fats Rolexes, that make our wrists really feel the tiniest, like we’re nonetheless simply little children taking part in dress-up.