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HOW A WATCH BECOMES A CLASSIC

THE MAKING OF A CLASSIC

What makes a watch a classic these days is not really a mystery: design that does not date, a detail that gets repeated, finishing that demands a closer look and a name that, over time, becomes part of the horological vocabulary.

These qualities are most visible through the same handful of famous references, like the Royal Oak or the Day-Date. But when the example is already a legend, it is never clear how much of the argument is the watch, and how much is the reputation doing the work for it. If we set the legends aside for a moment, we can see that the same qualities are just as evident in houses that are still in the process of earning their reputation.

LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS OF A CLASSIC EARLY

Age certainly helps a reputation, but it alone does not build one. A watch becomes a classic by making correct decisions repeatedly, and that process can begin on the first day a house exists just as easily as the hundredth year.

Atelier Wen was founded in 2018, which gives it almost none of the history a classic usually leans on. What it has instead is a set of decisions made with unusual discipline for so young a house. The Perception holds its 40mm case to a height of 9.4mm, a proportion chosen for the wrist rather than for the specification sheet, and its dial construction borrows sunmao, the mortise-and-tenon joinery used in Chinese architecture to hold four separate components together without adhesive.

None of this guarantees the watch will be remembered in 50 years. It does mean the house is already behaving as though it expects to be judged that closely, which is the most critical starting point a classic ever has.

WHEN FUNCTION BECOMES IDENTITY

Some of the details that end up defining a watch did not begin as design choices at all. They began as answers to a specific problem, and only later, once the problem stopped mattering, did they become part of how the watch is recognised.

The regulator display is a good example. Long before it appeared on a wrist, watchmakers used it on precision clocks kept in workshops, separating the hours, minutes and seconds onto their own axes so that each hand could be read without the others crowding the dial. The format nearly disappeared once ordinary three-hand watches became accurate enough that the extra clarity was no longer necessary.

Louis Erard revived it as the foundation of its identity when the house relaunched in 2003, and in the years since, watchmakers and artists including Alain Silberstein, Vianney Halter and Konstantin Chaykin have each reinterpreted the same layout in their own language. The technical reason for the regulator is largely gone. What remains is a format distinctive enough that Louis Erard has built an entire creative practice on continuing to ask what else it can become.

QUALITY THAT CONTINUES WHERE THE EYE STOPS

A classic tends to be finished as though someone is always looking closely, even when almost no one does. This is the least visible of its qualities and, to collectors who know to look for it, one of the most convincing.

The Ancestra Yao, created by Atelier Wen with Revolution for Dubai Watch Week 2025, was finished on that assumption throughout. Its dial pairs a fumé grand feu enamel gradient, a notoriously difficult effect to stabilise, over a hand-engraved silver base cut to mimic the weave of fabric. Its movement carries black-polished bridges, anglage, frosting, snailing and perlage, decorative techniques that exist only for whoever eventually opens the caseback. One of the bridges visible through the sapphire caseback is engraved with lines from Tian Wen, a classical Chinese poem contemplating existence.

None of this changes how the watch tells the time. All of it changes what the watch is and how it makes the collector feel, for anyone who takes the time to check.

WHEN A FEATURE DEFINES A WATCH

Every so often, a detail stops being a feature on a spec sheet and becomes a name collectors reach for on its own. Frederique Constant built one of these in 1994, six years into the house's history, when it cut a small aperture into a dial at 12 o'clock so the balance wheel underneath could be seen beating. Three decades on, the Heart Beat has resurfaced across the Classics collection, reappeared within Highlife references, and become, in the Classics Heart Beat Manufacture, a showcase for the in-house calibre the house had already begun developing before it completed its own manufacture in Geneva in 2006.

Ask for "the Heart Beat" at a counter, and there is no ambiguity about which detail is meant. A marketing brief cannot write that kind of shorthand alone. It only accumulates through a detail being strong enough – and present enough – that people stop needing the brand's full name to talk about it.

HOW THE LEGACY OF A CLASSIC LIVES ON

Occasionally, what becomes a classic is not the object still in production, but the decision it proved was possible, carried forward by watches that came after it.

By January 1979, Concord had ended a quiet contest among Swiss and Japanese watchmakers over how thin a watch could be. The Delirium Tres Mince measured 1.98mm from case back to crystal, beating its nearest rival by half a millimetre, by refusing to treat the case and the movement as separate problems: the caseback became the main plate, components mounted to it directly, and a battery built specifically for this watch by Renata sat at five o'clock.

The Delirium's specific record has since been overtaken, and the watch itself is now a footnote for most collectors. But the logic inside it – using the case as the movement rather than its container – went on to inform the Swatch a few years later, arguably one of the most consequential Swiss watch projects of the twentieth century. This is evidence that a classic can live on not as the watch, but as the idea that made the next watch possible.

TIME IS STILL THE JUDGE

None of these qualities, on their own, entitles a watch to be called a classic. A young house can craft with real discipline and still need decades to prove its approach was correct. A detail can outgrow its function and still fade if no one keeps choosing it. A name can start becoming shorthand, and stop halfway.

Perhaps the simplest test is this: does a watch continue to matter, five or ten years after it was introduced? Hype can often make a watch feel important overnight, but time is much harder to fool. Trends fade, new releases come and go and yesterday’s must-have can quickly become tomorrow’s forgotten model. In the end, a classic is a watch that continues to hold people’s attention long after the excitement has faded, and proves its appeal again and again.