Most desirable Mens watches

To join this community is to gain not only new friends but also enablers, who fully support the purchase of more and more timepieces, and are armed with time-tested justifications for angry wives and creative methods of financing these purchases. , it is something more intangible than that — a complete package of, yes, looks, but also intelligence, talent and career success. That got us thinking about what's behind other forms of desire. What attracts us to physical objects, like cars and Apple products? What is it about certain places that stimulates our wanderlust? We explore these questions in our new (free!) iPad app. Download it now.

The first watch that stole my heart was a Seiko. It was 1985 and I was 15 years old. I saw it in a jeweler’s display case at a mall where my friends and I used to kill winter weekend afternoons. It was a chunky steel dive watch with a blue and red rotating bezel and a thick rubber strap. It had the word “automatic” printed on the dial, and I was mesmerized by the smooth sweep of its seconds hand. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. It was the kind of watch a confident, adventurous man would wear while discovering a shipwreck or climbing an 8, 000-meter peak. In other words, it was the watch for the man I was not but wanted to be. And I didn’t have the $80 to buy it. That Seiko was the first watch I truly desired. But not the last.
To enter the world of fine wristwatches is to step through the wardrobe or down the rabbit hole. When you buy your first mechanical timepiece, it’s as if you stumbled upon a great secret within plain sight, while others go blindly about their business checking the time on their iPhones. You marvel at the tiny machine ticking quietly through the glass caseback, at the faceted hands and hand-applied markers on the dial. You find yourself gazing at it during meetings — and not because you’re counting the minutes until lunch time. Soon you want to learn everything there is know about this watch you bought, so off you go to the internet.
Beyond the watch-company websites, which seduce visitors with heroic histories and macro photography that borders on pornography, there are countless watch-enthusiast web forums. There’s one for military watches (only bona fide issued watches, mind you), one for frugal watch collectors, several for so-called “desk divers” (those office-bound souls who favor diving watches) and one for vintage Rolex collectors. A term has even been created for a denizen of these forums — Watch Idiot Savant, or WIS for short.
To be called a WIS is a badge of honor. It proclaims your membership in an online society of men (and a few women) who spend an inordinate amount of their income on largely obsolete objects and an inordinate amount of time on the internet writing about, posting photos of and researching watches. To join this community is to gain not only new friends but also enablers, who fully support the purchase of more and more timepieces, and are armed with time-tested justifications for angry wives and creative methods of financing these purchases. Like sharks, who must continue to swim and hunt or they’ll die, these self-proclaimed watch nerds are also always on the lookout for their next grail.
The term grail derives from that holiest of objects that proved elusive to adventurers since time immemorial, from the Round Table Knights to Indiana Jones. For car guys, the grail might be an E-Type Jaguar or a Shelby Cobra. For style-conscious men, it might be a bespoke Savile Row suit. Or, for a suburban teenager, it might be a self-winding Seiko dive watch. But a grail is a moving target, and just when you get your hands on it, another one materializes.
Occasionally, a member of a watch forum goes rogue and proclaims that he is selling his entire collection to find one completely fulfilling timepiece. He never succeeds, and the other members patiently wait for him to return, the prodigal collector who has come to his senses.