Collections Week: Fancy Lady Watches

Still In hibernation mode. Going a little stir crazy. So I spent an afternoon taking pictures of my vintage ladies watches collections. Well technically the Omega is a man’s watch. And most are from the 1970s and 1980s again, except for the Omega which is from 1966.

What’s interesting to me (and this might just be th cabin fever talking) is that when you start making a visual inventory of your stuff is that you see patterns emerging. I clearly have a nostalgia for 1970s design, but more pracrically, the timepieces from that era are also the ones that are flooding the secondary market (ie. thrift shops and antique stores) as their original owners are downsizing. Therefore they are affordable and attainable for me.

Pictured above, left to right: Le Must de Cartier tank; Gerard Perregeaux; Chanel Première; Zenith; Jaeger-LeCoultre Etrier; Omega. As you can see, I seem to favour square and rectangular dials.I also have more than a few Southwestern style watch tips. Okay the Seiko’s not Southwestern but I like to wear it with the Waterbury. I think I might take these two to SIHH instead of a GMT watch so I can keep track of the time difference between Toronto and Geneva.

What else can I tell you about this subset? The Mickey Mouse Watch was a present from my sister when I turned 19. I thought it worked with the Southwestern-style watch tips because I remember as a kid in the 1970s there was a Pan-Indian thing happening and most representations of First Nations people in movies and on TV had a Navajo vibe — even if you were visiting an Anishnabe pow wow in Ontario. And a lot of the jewelry you’d see for sale featured Disney characters (I’ve got a big Mickey pendant around here somewhere).

Anyway, from left to right: Seiko; Waterbury; Bradley Mickey Mouse;  Vulcain on a bracelet signed H. Long.

And here’s a group of some non-Swiss timepieces: a German-made Glashütte and an Italian manufactured Gucci — both from the 1970s. By the time the Gucci on the right was made in the 1980s, the company had started producing Swiss Made movements.

A few last thoughts for those who want to get into collecting luxury watches: Women’s timepieces are woefully