The BAW is not your garden-variety Rolex Submariner (41 mm) or even the slightly larger Yacht-Master (42 mm). I’m talking about the true behemoths of the watch world: the IWC BIG Pilot, the Breitling Navitimer, and one of Panerai’s classically beefy Luminors. If Arnold Schwarzenegger wouldn’t have worn it to gun down his enemies in the ‘90s, it doesn’t qualify as a BAW.
The splendor of wearing a BAW is that it feels so rude to do so. A few weeks ago, I wrote about my most complimented watch. Most observers of my G-Shock Cool Eyes, by contrast seem to ask me a question with their eyes: What the hell is that? This is a watch that attracts attention—even if it’s not always for the right reasons.
For most of my watch-collecting life, I’ve gravitated towards polite watches. My elegant Cartier Tank barely takes up the space of an Andes mint on my wrist. The rest of my watch repertoire—which includes some Seikos, a couple of dive watches from Doxa and Tudor, and a stone-dial dress piece—rarely, if ever, crosses over the 40-mm threshold. That puts me right in line with the average watch consumer’s tastes in 2025. It hasn’t always been this way, of course: In the ’90s and early 2000s, massive watches were the dominant stock and trade of most brands. To keep up with these demands, makers released bigger models like the Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean and Rolex Deepsea. But over the past decade, collectors have been swimming in the opposite direction.
What I love about the BAW is the way it pushes back against the immense pressure on brands to downsize their watches. In March, Breitling, one of the lone remaining holdouts to the shrinkage trend, announced a much slimmer version of its Top Time watch with a campaign starring small-watch evangelist Austin Butler. At Watches and Wonders this year, meanwhile, it felt like every brand’s presentation included some sort of offering to the Small Watch Gods. It started to feel like things were going too far in one direction—an A. Lange & Sohne 1815, for instance, felt preposterously small on my wrist at 34 mm. In fact, one of the standouts of the show for me was one of the few watches to buck against that trend: Tudor’s new Pelagos Ultra, which came in at a very unfashionable 43 mm. I loved it.
