Shall you just lock it up? I think it is about time.
It would be a bit sad.
Let’s move on the conversation: if there a gender difference, would it mean men are from Mars, women are from Venus? But can there be no gender differences?
I’ll speak for myself. Contrary to many men who say they got interested in watches because their fathers or grand fathers were interested, no one I know has ever been interested in watches.
But I have a keen, almost nerdy interest in history— and when I found out WWII pilot watches still existed, I knew I had to have one and started a long research which got me interested in vintage watches more broadly.
What I did have as a legacy, however, is a long held obsession with architecture and design- definitely a family inherited interest which I honed and in which I schooled myself since my teenage years. I probably took every tour offered at the Chicago architecture foundation, and since I love travel I took a similar interest in places from Vienna to Sudan to Central Asia.
I appreciate watches as wearable objects of design, and also as tokens of history. It doesn’t matter to me if they belonged to some war hero, because to me all watches reflect a certain place in history, they are relevant to the status of the economy and industry in their time.
One of my greatest kicks was to visit La Chaux de Fond and other places in Switzerland and to find out the huge impact of watch making on city planning, on architecture, and even on the ideas of people like Karl Marx and Le Corbusier. Do you know any other city with a street named “Street of the Balance”, or with huge signs on buildings saying “Chronometer”?
Although I can think of several female collectors knowledgeable about mechanical movements, I’m willing to believe many women don’t approach the mechanics of watches in the same way as men.
There’s such a long history of men being taught to like mechanics vs women being taught to have other interests.
Yet I took a horology workshop to learn how movements were made and how they work.
You have to admire the genius and ingenuity of the person who conceived the first movement powered by a spring, with a regulation powered by a counter spring. And I keep learning from my watchmaker every time he services a watch.
And since no post would be complete without picture.... I might edit this and post some later.
