Category: Cartier

Curating the Collection How Storage Impacts Confidence in Collecting

Just admit it: you, like me, give more than two shits about what people think of your watch collection, and the reason is clear: our collections represent us. Every little detail that we’ve allowed past the velvet rope into our personal horological disco is out on the floor for others to judge. We really wouldn’t give two shits about that judgement if we didn’t understand that what’s being judged is not watches but our most intimate expression of our mostly solipsistic and, thus, often lonely subjectivity inner lives. You, dear reader of horological essays, like me who writes them, give two shits about how people judge you if not your watches, I’m sure of it.

Curating the Collection Allen Pares Back to Less Than 20 Core Watches

All activity on my personal watch collection has come to a grinding halt since I bought my two Cartier Tanks toward the end of 2020. Having invested in a stereo system and guitar stuff, both of which have been important for me during COVID isolation, my watch funds have been a bit tapped. But the… Read more »

Book Review “The Cartiers” by Francesca Cartier Brickell

The Cartiers is far more than a family member’s account of the legendary luxury brand; it is a unique overview of the 20th Century from a very specific – but entirely compelling – point of view.

Monogamous Wrist Dec 2020 Edition

Our poor wrists bear the literal weight of our horological obsessions, and yet we never hear from them. It’s time to let our wrists speak! Allen’s Wrist The incessant pulse of Allen’s mechanical watch movements is the rhythm by which I live my life, and during 2020 that rhythm felt like a slow, somber dirge…. Read more »

Podcast Insights E19 – Wrist-Presence & The Inelegance of Tool Watches

Evolutionary theory suggests that we are drawn to certain people and not others based on hardwired aesthetic judgements wrought over some five-million years. Allen suggests that similar hardwired aesthetics are at play when we judge “wrist presence,” and goes on to suggest that tool watches categorically fail to achieve this elusive quality. A deep dive… Read more »

Insight The Psychology of Watch Size & The Black Box of Taste

In 1970, psychologist Richard L. Gregory hypothesized that the human brain uses “top-down processing” to generate what we perceive via our eyes. The theory argued that our backlog of visual experiences give shape to the images we perceive. By the 1990s, experiments had robustly backed up this theory, and psychologists now widely accept that what… Read more »