Woman’s hour

Nick Foulkes

Watches

Of late I have had a number of men getting in touch with me to ask which watches to buy their wives. This is one of those perennial questions that has vexed mankind ever since, well — the invention of time. You can just imagine Marc Antony fretting about what sort of sundial to buy Cleopatra for her birthday, or Raleigh casting confusedly around whatever it was that late 16th-century London had in answer to Cartier in search of a suitably glamorous time-telling gewgaw for Queen Elizabeth I.

The problem with buying watches for women is that the issue of timepieces is one of

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the great faultlines in the whole Mars/Venus relationship thing. Watches are the kind of items that men look to for a little bit of welcome complication; a minute repeater here, a tourbillon there and a perpetual calendar somewhere else. Men who like watches tend to like them to perform all sorts of bravura feats of horological ingenuity that really have very little to do with life in the 21st century.

Women, on the other hand, tend to like a watch that tells the time with a degree of reliability and accuracy and, if the watch is being worn with a long dress, there is a requirement that it does so with the assistance of a few carats of diamonds. This has meant that jewellers have traditionally made the sort of watches that women want to wear; I have yet to meet a woman, who would turn down a Cartier watch. Indeed, it strikes me that some of the most well-priced and interesting vintage Cartiers are the women’s jewellery watches of the mid-20th century, which also satisfy movement snobs: the innards of these watches tend to be supplied by the likes of Jaeger LeCoultre.

More recently, this has tended to mean that women have been fed a horological diet of quartz watches which need little looking after and no winding up. This sounds rather patronising, and a relatively new school of thought teaches that modern women are becoming increasingly like men in their taste for mechanical watches. However, I think that this has more to do with men transferring their own snobbery to the timepieces worn by the women in their lives. It is not often that one meets a woman outside the watch trade who really cares passionately about what goes on under the dial of her timepiece.

Certainly my attempts to get Mrs Foulkes into a mechanical watch were unsuccessful. My wife has very elegant, one might say dainty, wrists, and when I was looking for a watch for her we browsed at Cartier and I tried to steer her into one of the newer Santos models with a manually wound movement. While she knew that I wanted to see her in a mechanical timepiece, she herself was in no doubt that the smaller dimensions of the quartz model suited her better and I had to agree: as anyone knows, all successful marriages are founded on a healthy exchange of views, after which the husband does what his wife wants.

There are, however, a number of women’s watches from the grander houses of haute horlogerie that are aimed at the woman who wants more from a watch than just a pretty face. Patek Philippe is coming out with a women’s range of its classic sports watch, the Nautilus, and it recently released a feminine version of its classic complication, the Annual Calendar.

And when it comes to seducing women, Italian men know a thing or two. This nation al stereotype is amply borne out by Dott Gino

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Macaluso, owner of the Sowind Group, which includes the brands JeanRichard and Girard

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Perregaux. Macaluso has come up with some truly inspiring complications for women. For

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instance, there is a JeanRichard watch that has a special love indicator, calibrating various degrees of infatuation from a merely coquettish ‘un peu’ to the utterly smitten ‘d la folie’. While from Girard Perregaux there is a charming oval watch, called Cat’s Eye, which boasts an annual calendar equipped with that ne plus ultra of astrological whimsy, a zodiac function that indicates the star sign. While the

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most practical feminine complication I have yet come across is Girard Perregaux’s wwtc 24 Hour Shopping, a watch that gives the time in all the world’s timezones not according to city, but to shopping district: rue du Faubourg St Honoré, Bond Street, Madison Avenue, Rodeo Drive, etc.

Earlier I said that it is not often that one meets a woman collector who cares about watch movements; well, the other day, over a dinner in Hong Kong, I did meet just such a woman. As we talked and she enumerated her collection of over 100 watches including Rolexes, a Girard Perregaux tourbillon with three gold bridges, rare pieces from A. Lange & Söhne and over a dozen Patek Philippes (clutch of wrist candy worth well into seven figures). I found myself thinking that those men who want women to take more of an interest in watches should be careful what they wish for, as finding the right Christmas present could become a seriously expensive business.