There was really nowhere to go from there but back down. Diesel, a quartz fashion brand, made a chronograph in 2013 with a 76mm case. Pilot’s watches and chronographs also set a standard for big and bulky: The IWC Ingenieur Chronograph maxed out at 45mm, as did Zenith’s Pilot model, even the non-chronograph variety. It became a fashion trend, and even quartz watches were turning out beasts as big as Panerai Luminors, which average about 45mm and frequently reach 47mm. It was a transformation initially driven by the popularity of the chronograph, which required a large canvas to display its counters and a thick case to ensure the water resistance expected of a sports watch. Sometime around the late 1990s, just as mechanical watches were emerging from the quartz crisis and experiencing the early stages of a multibillion-dollar recovery, they started to get big again. It wasn’t long before it dawned on watchmakers that an enormous timepiece on the wrist was unwieldy and unnecessary, so they began to reinvent movements on a smaller scale.īeginning in the late 1940s and continuing through the ’50s and ’60s, watches settled in at around the 35- to 38-millimeter-diameter mark, and those constitute the bulk of the most sought-after vintage designs of today. Louis Cartier made an early version in 1911 for his friend, aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, who was tired of having to yank out his pocket watch to navigate while in flight. For men they started out big, since the first ones were pocket watches with straps attached to them. Like hemlines, watch proportions wax and wane in cycles. More than a dozen brands welcomed new product lines in small sizes-or welcomed reduced versions of existing popular models. Thick as a hockey puck or puny as a nickel? At the moment, watchmakers are leaning into the latter, a trend that crescendoed last month at Watches and Wonders, the annual luxury watch fair in Geneva. Ever since the wristwatch was invented, its makers have grappled with the question of how big it should be.
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