This is an edition of the newsletter Box + Papers, Cam Wolf’s weekly deep dive into the world of watches. Sign up here.
It’s Hot Take Month here on Box + Papers, with a new guest writer dropping by each Friday to deliver their spiciest watch opinion. This week, I’ve finally wrestled Yang-Yi Goh, GQ’s senior style editor, into the catbird seat of B+P. One of the most stylish dudes on the planet, the only guy I know who loves Blink-182 more than I do, and an absolute god at scooping up cool stuff on eBay. Every couple of weeks, he messages me something watch-related on Slack that makes me think, YOU HAVE TO WRITE THAT! That’s exactly how today’s column came to be. —Cam Wolf
I own exactly three watches. There’s my daily driver, my 1969 Seiko 6139-6010 “Bruce Lee,” a handsome, dependable automatic chronograph with a rich backstory. There’s my dress watch, a slim, manual-winding, ’60s-era Universal Geneve number, which I break out whenever I’m feeling a little fancy. And then there’s my other watch, the one I often forget about completely, that I am always pleasantly surprised to stumble upon in a dresser drawer every couple of months: a quartz-powered Timex MK1 field watch, made in collaboration with the low-key Brooklyn menswear gods at Adsum.
The thing that shocks me most about the Timex? No matter how long it’s been since I last wore it, be it a couple of weeks or half a year, the thing is always still ticking—and keeping good time, at that. In the three or so years that I’ve owned it, I’ve never once had to change the battery. Given that my Seiko’s automatic movement stops still after a day or two of inactivity, and my Universal Geneve needs to be wound by hand before every wear, the Timex’s steady march forward in the face of utter neglect never ceases to astonish me.
Because here’s the truth: Quartz watches are a goddamn miracle, and it’s high time we all gave ’em the respect they so richly deserve. I’m not a “true” watch guy by any means, but I’ve been editing this very column for long enough to know all the valid reasons that horology heads hate on battery-operated timepieces. The widespread adoption of the cheap-to-produce technology in the ’70s and ’80s all but hollowed out the Swiss watchmaking industry—an era often referred to as the “Quartz Crisis,” which sounds too much like a DC Comics crossover event for me to really take seriously. And then there’s the fact that quartz watches, with their grotesque circuit board innards, simply don’t possess the artful beauty of an automatic or manual movement, an orchestra of whirring rotors and shifting gears all rigged together meticulously by a master craftsperson.
