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, we’re joined by Tony Traina, an OG of the watch newsletter game, former Hodinkee editor, and one of my favorite writers in the business (he’s contributed to GQ several times already). After you’re finished reading this, be sure to subscribe to Tony’s newsletter Unpolished. — Cam Wolf
The most popular advice in watch collecting is also the most useless. If this were a cable news segment, I’d insert a supercut here — it might even include Cam, or me, or other prominent watch world figures parroting it: “Buy what you love.”
That phrase, for all its ubiquity, is meaningless, beyond the point of platitude. Who could argue with it?
I’m not saying you can’t love watches. The unexplainable emotional connection I feel towards at least a few of my favorite pieces — say my Rolex Explorer 1016 or Swatch Kailua — must border on the romantic. But the advice to “buy what you love” gets the sequence backwards. It suggests love should be the starting point for a decision, when in fact it’s the result of a good one. The “love” (or whatever we’re diagnosing me with) I feel towards some watches comes from understanding, living with, and appreciating.
But where did this meaningless mantra even come from? It probably started as a useful reminder that watches aren’t investments — these little objects have an emotional pull and shouldn’t be thought of as financial instruments. As watches exploded in popularity and people started treating them like wrist-based NFTs, “buy what you love” became pushback against pure speculation. But somewhere along the way, the reminder got repeated so often it lost all meaning.
