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To explore the evolution and function of the wristwatch as a contemporary cultural icon.
International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research
The watch as cultural icon
Dennis R. Hall
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Dennis R. Hall, (2008),"The watch as cultural icon", International J ournal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality
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The watch as cultural icon
Dennis R. Hall
University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky, USA
Abstract
Purpose – To explore the evolution and function of the wristwatch as a contemporary cultural icon.
Design/methodology/approach – To apply the concepts of iconography and of postmodern
cultural theory to the general history of watches and to examine the meaning watches in contemporary
culture.
Findings – Because the watch oscillates between use and signal values, the watch enjoys a distinct
iconic status in contemporary American culture, evoking a host of often con?icting associations: those
allied to work, productivity, enterprise and success, on the one hand, and those related to
self-indulgence, status luxury and excess, on the other hand. The development of cheap electronic
movements ought to have spelled disaster for the watch both as a business and as a cultural icon, but
beginning in the 1980s the watch aggressively fought back within the signal economy to represent a
postmodern sense of the concept of time and culture.
Research limitations/implications – Wrist watches have a much fuller history, technical and
cultural, than reported here and many more metonymic associations than those considered in this
paper.
Practical implications – Considering the wrist watch, a common bit of material culture, as a
cultural icon enables one better to consider and to appreciate the iconicity of common objects, as well
as the iconicity of places and people.
Originality/value – This paper models a way of considering the meanings of things, applicable to
the host of technological things that increasingly ?ll daily life: cell phones, PDAs, Blackberries, laptop
computers, and the like.
Keywords Popular culture, Postmodernism, United States of America
Paper type Conceptual paper
While people are relatively comfortable considering the cultural work performed by
such iconic ?gures as George Washington or Marilyn Monroe or Mick Jaggar or even
such iconic creations as Uncle Sam or Mickey Mouse or Rosie the Riveter, people are
less adroit in dealing with the iconography of things, particularly common things. The
watch, for all its individual variation, however, is an immediately recognizable bit of
material culture ?lled with meaning. Watches, as do houses, cars, clothes, computer
systems, and the rest of the objects of human consumption, demonstrate that goods, as
Douglas and Isherwood (1996, p. 67) express the point, constitute an “information
system” and that human beings “need goods for communicating with others and for
making sense out of what is going on” around them. The watch rises to the level of
cultural icon by standing many if not all such tests of iconography as surviving change
over time, use in ritual behavior, accumulation of associations, trigger for memory and
nostalgia. contextual spread, wide recognition, representational use, generational
difference, ambiguity of meaning, and, perhaps most importantly, rich metonymic
resonance – that is, the capacity to embody associated ideas that allows the watch to
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/1750-6182.htm
A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2007 Popular Culture Association
Conference held in Boston.
The watch as
cultural icon
5
Received October 2006
Revised April 2007
Accepted November 2007
International Journal of Culture,
Tourism and Hospitality Research
Vol. 2 No. 1, 2008
pp. 5-11
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1750-6182
DOI 10.1108/17506180810856103
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deliver meanings beyond the simple utilitarian functions of a timepiece into every lived
or created context in which a watch appears.
The watch is especially interesting with regard to iconography because in no other
product commonly available to the American consumer is the spread between use and
signal values as great or as conspicuous as in the watch. Indeed, the difference between
use and signal values is considerably more dif?cult to perceive and appreciate in cars,
wines, electronics, insurance, banking, education, and even clothing thanit is in watches.
That the watch commands linguistic accommodation also points to its status as cultural
icon. “Watch” continues as the current generic term for a timepiece worn on the wrist.
“Wrist watch” was, during the time of its early development and immediately after
WWI, the retronym used to distinguish it from the “pocket watch” of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, just as “analog watch” is a retronym distinguishing a watch with
“a face and hands” from a “digital watch” with a LED or LCD time display. That the
watch is constantly the object of technical innovation and of linguistic attention is
among many indicators of its cultural resonance.
While, no doubt, some intrinsic differences emerge between, for example, the
$10,000.00 mechanical “BVLGARI BVLGARI” and the $5.00 electronic Wal-Mart
special, both watches keep time within tolerable limits, and as a practical matter – the
matter of simple utility – they are far more alike than different, and neither is as likely
to be as consistently accurate as the report of the time and date on the common cell
phone. The considerable speculation that time is running out for the wristwatch, soon
to be “Killed off by the phone,” seems to be anticipatory and has, so far, not been born
out by declines in watch sales. While some people, especially young people, may
consult a cell phone or an iPod or a PDA or some other such device to the complete
exclusion of watches, the watch, if for some only as a fashion accessory, continues to
survive (Farrell, 2007). Cultural icons exhibit the capacity to rede?ne themselves in the
midst of technical and cultural change. To compare the $100.00 Fossil watches for men
and women available at Dillards for Valentine’s Day 2007, with the $10,000,00
BVLGARI, the one timepiece functions, by whatever measures one might employ, does
not function 100 times better than the other. Although never acknowledged in the
promotional literature or in reviews that commonly appear in periodicals dependent
upon watch advertising. The electronic movements are functionally better:
[C]ompared to electronic movements, mechanical watches keep very poor time, often with
errors of seconds per day. They are frequently sensitive to position and temperature, they are
costly to produce, they require regular maintenance and adjustment, and they are more prone
to failure. For this reason, inexpensive and moderately priced timepieces with electronic
movements now provide most users with superbly accurate timekeeping and have almost
entirely supplanted older watch designs with mechanical movements (Wikipedia, 2007).
Nevertheless, the watch is distinct in the culture of consumer goods because it
incorporates both a concrete commodity, an object with genuine use value, and a signal
commodity, an object with representational value. In the community of consumer
goods, watches occupy in the early twenty-?rst century a position analogous to the
liminal condition Turner (1964) describes. Moreover, this liminal position, this
oscillation between use and signal values, in large measure accounts for the iconic
status of the watch, and sustains its distinct cultural resonance. Particularly in
contemporary American culture, the watch evokes a host of often-con?icting
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associations: those allied to work, productivity, enterprise, and success, on the one
hand, and those related to self-indulgence, status, luxury, and excess, on the other
hand. These con?icting associations reveal not only the long standing human desire of
wanting to having it – whatever “it” may be – both ways, but also the ambiguity and
play at the core of the postmodern cultural landscape. Moreover, a watch is never
“unmarked” – that is, to wear a watch or not to wear a watch delivers messages about
oneself, just as the watch one wears delivers a host of additional messages into the
environment one inhabits. As Csikszentmihayi and Rochberg-Halton (1981, p. 239)
found, things have their signi?cance less from their function than from “. . . the
information they convey about the owner and his or her ties to others.”
For most of its history keeping time has been the privilege of the powerful, a
mechanism used to keep order, to exercise control – from the monks’ observance of
Divine Of?ce in the Middle Ages to agricultural labor to work in the factory system to
the navigation of ships and the scheduling of trains to the synchronizing of military
operations from Waterloo to Iraq. From roughly the through the seventeenth century,
however, keeping time was the work of clocks maintained in towers at the village or
city center or from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries of clocks kept on the
walls of factories, of?ces, shops, and schools. To this day clocks remain the relatively
stationary prerogative of those who can afford them and, more to the point in
contemporary culture, of those who can impose them upon others. Pocket watches
emerge in the eighteenth century as a mark of early modern culture, a sign not only of
technical revolution but also of making portable a signi?cant power, taking control of
one’s self and environment into the world. Pocket watches steadily improved,
becoming less expensive (though never cheap as timepieces are today), and more
widely available through the nineteenth century, providing ample evidence that people
able to synchronize their efforts – be they military, commercial, educational, political,
missionary, industrial, or criminal – were people likely to accomplish their ends.
Clocks, as instruments of power, from their technically primitive beginnings
accrued, as do many such things, the ornamentation of wealth, from such conspicuous
signs of the source of power as the gold and enamel clock on the manor house mantle to
the imposing tower of Big Ben. As wealth bled into the middling classes in the
nineteenth century, ornament gave way to the craftsmanship of the grandfather clock
in the hall or the aptly named regulator clock on the wall, but the signs of wealth and
power remained clear even in this relatively austere cultural code. Watches, of course,
also bore the marks of ornamentation, as suggested in their role as the target of thieves
real and ?ctional and in their ability to de?ne the gentleman about town. To possess a
watch was as distinct a class marker as to own a carriage. But the core value of the
watch in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resided less in the pennyweight of the
gold case than in the function of its works which in turn promoted economic and social
mobility, and thereby served as an index of a man in and of the world. While the clock
marked the exercise of power in the ?xed environments of the manor house, the shop,
or the factory, the watch pointed to the exchange and other marketplaces. The watch
allowed one to take time into environments where time had not existed and to impose
its discipline. Moreover, the watch was a sign of social and economic fungibility,
became the physical sign of time and of the commodi?cation of time; that is, the
realization that, as Ben Franklin famously expressed the point, time is money and
money is time. The watch disseminated the work narrowly begun by the clock,
The watch as
cultural icon
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allowing time to be signed, as well as understood, as something to be consumed, as the
host of aphorisms that turn on “spending” time demonstrates. To one degree or
another – no doubt often naively – a watch signed a dispersal, even a democratization,
of agency. On balance, the clock signs control of others, while the watch signs a self at
work in the world.
The modern resonance of the watch retains many of these early modern
associations. The watch migrated from the vest pocket to the left wrist of of?cers
during World War I to meet the demands of the machine gun, a development extended
and democratized during World War II, as the watch increasingly became general
issue to GIs, a sign as well as tool of those engaged in matters of life and death, one
they took with them upon return to civilian life. By the mid-twentieth-century the
wristwatch was ?rmly embedded in modern consciousness as a sign of action and
work in the world. A watch, both as a practical tool and as cultural sign, was, for
example, the ideal high-school graduation gift, marking for most people entry into the
world of work and for others entry into nursing school, college, or some other
post-secondary training – environments where success depended upon one’s personal
capacity to keep time, to manage time, to use time, to exploit time. Before the advent of
the Timex, the graduation watch was an Elgin, Gruen, Illinois, Bulova, Longines, or
Hamilton – if one re poor, perhaps an Ingersoll or Baby Ben pocket watch –
representing a major parental investment. But whatever the brand or cost, the watch
represented a more signi?cant emotional investment, a declaration of con?dence. For
many years a new watch marked a new beginning, was thought to trigger crucial
processes of growth and development – a cultural burden now borne by the
acquisition of a new computer, which only incidentally keeps time powered by a
lithium battery. By the mid-twentieth century, the wristwatch came comfortably to
embrace contrary associations worthy of William Blake: the watch internalized the
social and economic controls of the clock, while the watch advanced the freedom and
self-direction of the pocket watch. On the one hand, the watch marked the reliability of
a team player, a company man, while, on the other hand, the watch depicted the
independence of an innovator, a corporate leader.
The Timex brought on dramatic change. As John Cameron Swayze “reported” in his
famous TV ads of the 1950s, the watch that “takes a licking and keeps on ticking,” did
usher in the mass production and marketing of cheap reliable watches, timepieces that
many corporate executives in the 1950s and 1960s conspicuously wore, at least in the
presence of their share holders. The Timex was a real James Cash Penny product.
Bulova’s introduction of the turning fork watch in 1960 remained an expensive
technical innovation, soon to be replaced in the mass market in 1970s by cheap quartz
analog and digital watches. At the turn of the millennium, the cost of these reliable
quartz movements, now manufactured principally in Asia, has plunged to remarkable
lows, nearly to a price point that may soon allow promoters to give away watches as
they now do ball-point pens.
An economics of pure utility would have spelled a disaster for the watch business,
but watches have always also traf?cked in the signal economy. “Fine watches” always
found a market where some relationship between the container and the contained
struggled to survive as makers sold increasingly reliable mechanical, often jeweled,
movements in expensive cases. As electronically driven quartz technology
democratized the watch’s works, the trade, beginning in the 1980s, aggressively
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fought back within the signal economy. The current extent of this effort is revealed in
the advertisements for very expensive watches in the early pages of just about any
edition of The New York Times, in a 66 page Sunday Times advertising supplement,
“Watch Your Time” (October 15, 2006), and in any number of an advertising magazine
called hr: Watches, the April 2007 (Vol. 10 No. 2) number of which runs to 96 glossy
pages where the boundary between advertisement and copy is extremely dif?cult to
discern.
The nostalgic appeal of “mechanicals,” as they are known in the trade, has been
extended into even more intricate “complication” watches, devices with, ironically,
almost as many functions as a cheap digital watch, often with the works exposed
through a clear back or to the face. The Rolex came into its own, as did such names as
Jaeger-le Coultre, Hubolt, Chopard, Girard-Perregaux, Pattek Philippe, TAG Heuer,
Baume & Mercier, among many others. Indeed, all of the luxury goods houses now
brand high-end watches: Tiffany’s, Cartier, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Mont Blanc, Movado,
Chanel, Burberry, again, among many others. And business is good. About 70 million
adults, more than a third of the US population, bought watches in 2003, almost
75 percent of them bought the watches for themselves. While 36.2 million buyers paid
under $50.00, 27.2 million paid $50.00-299.00, and 4.6 million paid over $300.00
(Research Alert, 2004). Between May 2004 and May 2005, more than 37,000 watches
sold at retail price points above $10,000, amounting to $ 730 million in business
(National Jeweler, 2007). Given the ever diminishing role of utility in watch ownership,
the vast majority of these watches, wherever one places the “price point” must serve, as
an industry web site expresses the point, “as an expression and extension of the
wearer’s personality” (Encyclope´die, 2007).
The extravagant excess of an expensive watch may be simply a mark of success or
an act of social aggression – classic conspicuous consumption. But watch wearing also
re?ects the “. . . autoreferentiality of all modern culture, which,” as Jameson (1998, p. 14)
expresses the point, “tends to turn upon itself and designate its own cultural
production as its content”. The watch now is less about time and management and is
increasingly about itself as a cluster of cultural signs. Watches, as are all cultural icons,
are mediating devices. The presence or absence of a watch is meaningful, as is the kind
of watch and the brand of watch one wears. Watches deliver a host of messages about
oneself to others. The watch, as do all icons, does this mediating work cultural work by
foregrounding the material. In an era where so much commodity production and
consumption is abstract, watches, ?rmly lodged in space and time, have a special
appeal, lending themselves to ritual and so to express in a non-verbal way something
that cannot be expressed in the controlling conventions of words. The savory irony
here, of course, is that the watch does this work by transforming this relatively
comfortable concrete reality into a resonate image.
Among those signs is a vestigial nostalgia for the mechanical in a culture
increasingly dominated by the electronic. “Technostalgia,” as this perception of earlier
forms of technology as simpler to use and having better quality is called, also evokes a
less abstract, less cognitively challenging cultural environment. Vic Muniz, for
example, who recently purchased a $25,000 A. Lange & So¨hne watch, is reported to:
. . . fetishize about its incredibly precise mechanical movement, which has to be manually
wound every four days or so. And by virtue of a “skeleton” back the sapphire works can be
seen working away. “I always loved anything mechanical,” said Mr Muniz (Colman, 2007).
The watch as
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Complication watches really do cost a lot to make and a lot to buy, but one is buying a
mechanical curiosity rather than a timepiece, the twenty-?rst century equivalent of
the automatons popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such a watch is
an arti?cially constructed antique, which one is instructed to preserve as an heirloom
and add to one’s estate. These watches are sold as signs of family and status that most
buyers have never had but seek to construct.
Among those signs is connoisseurship. Most high-end watches at least aspire to
artistic design, often functioning as a wrist-worn objet d’ art. Many watches are nearly
impossible to read, but the crass utility of telling time, of course, is not the point;
keeping time is only an alibi for other cultural interests. The now famous Movado
watch aggressively dismisses time keeping for art, allowing its owners to enjoy the
radiance of the design on their wrists having been included in the collection of the
Museum of Modern Art. While the unique is ?nally not possible in consumer goods,
very high prices tend to reduce their dissemination, so to preserve the taste of the
buyer. Also among those signs is the watch as vestmentary code for the entrepreneur, a
sign of the audacity associated with this status. The watch best operates in this realm
by discarding associations with such mundane functions as keeping time or oversight
or management so to become the mark of insight or money or aggression – ?nally of
the transforming power of the people Thomas Carlyle called captains of industry. The
entrepreneur does not consult his watch; rather, he wears a watch, in a signal display
just as an eighteenth-century gentleman wore a sword or a nineteenth-century
gentleman carried a walking stick. Moreover, women, as they increasingly move from
the managerial to the entrepreneurial ranks are, as do men, buying these high-end
watches for themselves. As one TableBasee article reports, “The ultra high end:
Women’s watch sales catch up. Among the 31,000 luxury watches sold at prices
between $10,000 and 24,999, men’s watches accounted for 66 percent of sales, with ?ne
mechanical timepieces leading the way. But for watches as price points above $25,000,
women’s watches were catching up fast – accounting for nearly half (49 percent) of
the 6,200 ultra-high end watches that re sold during the 12-month period” (“Watch
sales growth” 2007). Other TableBasee items con?rm that women increasing buy
mechanicals for themselves.
A watch remains one of the few widely accepted jewelry options open to men, with
the aggressive practices of rap music stars and a few other celebrities emerging as
notable and very complicated signal variations. And until recently, watches at the
high end for women were swallowed in the category “jewelry,” functioned principally as
bling, often marking the subordinate status of women to the men who presumably gifted
the watches. But the watch nowextends the feminization of men and the masculinization
of women, extends gender complexity if not gender confusion. The increasing taste for
“mechanical” watches among women suggests the effectiveness this vestmentary code
in helping to de?ne the entrepreneur, man or woman. Oddly, the watch, a ubiquitous
element in the cultural landscape, advances individuality at a time when singularity is
under great pressure from forces that would homogenize us all. But the watch may be
one of those “retorparadoxes” that Jameson (1998, p. 52) describes, a convergence of
cultural forces such that an image conceals within itself, forces that will undermine
it. Once upon a time, a person ordinarily had, apart from a collection of jewelry,
one watch – at the outside two, perhaps one for work and one for play or one dressy
and one casua – that advanced one’s individuality, contributed to one’s de?nition.
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And very often that watch was a gift, possibly an unconscious de?nition of one’s self by
another. Today, the cheapness of watches has led to their proliferation, a ready collection
of signs to mark a wide variety of identities. But watches, the high and the low, even in
the face of their seemingly schizophrenic diversity, maintain a fundamental sameness.
The watch as an agent de?ning the individual carries in itself the very seeds of its own
displacement.
When – not all that many years ago in the scheme of things – the associations of
the watch were more closely allied to its use value, the watch was a cultural icon
bearing de?ning power and authority. But as the watch became more accessible, and
so more open to the interests of its signal value, the watch came to be more at home in
the indeterminacy and play at the core of postmodern culture. In one of the sweetest of
postmodern ironies, the watch has come to represent the postmodern concept of time –
the assault on both a sense of the past and a sense of the future. The watch has become
an icon, as Jameson (1998, p. 20) expresses this notion, of “the fragmentation of time
into a series of presents”.
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Colman, D. (2007), “Note ready to wind down”, The New York Times, p. 9 (“Possessed” column),
28 January, Section 9.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. and Rochberg-Halton, E. (1981), The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols
and the Self, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY.
Douglas, M. and Isherwood, B. (1996), The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of
Consumption, Routledge, New York, NY.
Farrell, N. (2007), “Time runs out for the wristwatch: killed off by the phone”, available at: www.
theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article ¼ ¼ 28927 (accessed September 1, 2007).
Encyclope´die (2007), History of ?ne watches, available at: www.worldtempus.com/wt/6791/
(accessed September 1, 2007).
Jameson, F. (1998), The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998, Verso,
New York, NY.
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Vol. 99 No. 15, Table Basee (accessed December 1, 2007).
Research Alert (2004), “More than a third of adults bought watches in 2203”, Research Alert,
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(eds).(1972), Reader in Comparative Religion, 3rd ed., Harper, New York, NY.
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1, 2007).
Corresponding author
Dennis R. Hall can be contacted at: [email protected]
The watch as
cultural icon
11
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doc_916141354.pdf
To explore the evolution and function of the wristwatch as a contemporary cultural icon.
International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research
The watch as cultural icon
Dennis R. Hall
Article information:
To cite this document:
Dennis R. Hall, (2008),"The watch as cultural icon", International J ournal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality
Research, Vol. 2 Iss 1 pp. 5 - 11
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Alessandro Brun, Cecilia Castelli, (2013),"The nature of luxury: a consumer perspective", International
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Yuri Seo, Margo Buchanan-Oliver, (2015),"Luxury branding: the industry, trends, and future
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The watch as cultural icon
Dennis R. Hall
University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky, USA
Abstract
Purpose – To explore the evolution and function of the wristwatch as a contemporary cultural icon.
Design/methodology/approach – To apply the concepts of iconography and of postmodern
cultural theory to the general history of watches and to examine the meaning watches in contemporary
culture.
Findings – Because the watch oscillates between use and signal values, the watch enjoys a distinct
iconic status in contemporary American culture, evoking a host of often con?icting associations: those
allied to work, productivity, enterprise and success, on the one hand, and those related to
self-indulgence, status luxury and excess, on the other hand. The development of cheap electronic
movements ought to have spelled disaster for the watch both as a business and as a cultural icon, but
beginning in the 1980s the watch aggressively fought back within the signal economy to represent a
postmodern sense of the concept of time and culture.
Research limitations/implications – Wrist watches have a much fuller history, technical and
cultural, than reported here and many more metonymic associations than those considered in this
paper.
Practical implications – Considering the wrist watch, a common bit of material culture, as a
cultural icon enables one better to consider and to appreciate the iconicity of common objects, as well
as the iconicity of places and people.
Originality/value – This paper models a way of considering the meanings of things, applicable to
the host of technological things that increasingly ?ll daily life: cell phones, PDAs, Blackberries, laptop
computers, and the like.
Keywords Popular culture, Postmodernism, United States of America
Paper type Conceptual paper
While people are relatively comfortable considering the cultural work performed by
such iconic ?gures as George Washington or Marilyn Monroe or Mick Jaggar or even
such iconic creations as Uncle Sam or Mickey Mouse or Rosie the Riveter, people are
less adroit in dealing with the iconography of things, particularly common things. The
watch, for all its individual variation, however, is an immediately recognizable bit of
material culture ?lled with meaning. Watches, as do houses, cars, clothes, computer
systems, and the rest of the objects of human consumption, demonstrate that goods, as
Douglas and Isherwood (1996, p. 67) express the point, constitute an “information
system” and that human beings “need goods for communicating with others and for
making sense out of what is going on” around them. The watch rises to the level of
cultural icon by standing many if not all such tests of iconography as surviving change
over time, use in ritual behavior, accumulation of associations, trigger for memory and
nostalgia. contextual spread, wide recognition, representational use, generational
difference, ambiguity of meaning, and, perhaps most importantly, rich metonymic
resonance – that is, the capacity to embody associated ideas that allows the watch to
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/1750-6182.htm
A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2007 Popular Culture Association
Conference held in Boston.
The watch as
cultural icon
5
Received October 2006
Revised April 2007
Accepted November 2007
International Journal of Culture,
Tourism and Hospitality Research
Vol. 2 No. 1, 2008
pp. 5-11
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1750-6182
DOI 10.1108/17506180810856103
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deliver meanings beyond the simple utilitarian functions of a timepiece into every lived
or created context in which a watch appears.
The watch is especially interesting with regard to iconography because in no other
product commonly available to the American consumer is the spread between use and
signal values as great or as conspicuous as in the watch. Indeed, the difference between
use and signal values is considerably more dif?cult to perceive and appreciate in cars,
wines, electronics, insurance, banking, education, and even clothing thanit is in watches.
That the watch commands linguistic accommodation also points to its status as cultural
icon. “Watch” continues as the current generic term for a timepiece worn on the wrist.
“Wrist watch” was, during the time of its early development and immediately after
WWI, the retronym used to distinguish it from the “pocket watch” of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, just as “analog watch” is a retronym distinguishing a watch with
“a face and hands” from a “digital watch” with a LED or LCD time display. That the
watch is constantly the object of technical innovation and of linguistic attention is
among many indicators of its cultural resonance.
While, no doubt, some intrinsic differences emerge between, for example, the
$10,000.00 mechanical “BVLGARI BVLGARI” and the $5.00 electronic Wal-Mart
special, both watches keep time within tolerable limits, and as a practical matter – the
matter of simple utility – they are far more alike than different, and neither is as likely
to be as consistently accurate as the report of the time and date on the common cell
phone. The considerable speculation that time is running out for the wristwatch, soon
to be “Killed off by the phone,” seems to be anticipatory and has, so far, not been born
out by declines in watch sales. While some people, especially young people, may
consult a cell phone or an iPod or a PDA or some other such device to the complete
exclusion of watches, the watch, if for some only as a fashion accessory, continues to
survive (Farrell, 2007). Cultural icons exhibit the capacity to rede?ne themselves in the
midst of technical and cultural change. To compare the $100.00 Fossil watches for men
and women available at Dillards for Valentine’s Day 2007, with the $10,000,00
BVLGARI, the one timepiece functions, by whatever measures one might employ, does
not function 100 times better than the other. Although never acknowledged in the
promotional literature or in reviews that commonly appear in periodicals dependent
upon watch advertising. The electronic movements are functionally better:
[C]ompared to electronic movements, mechanical watches keep very poor time, often with
errors of seconds per day. They are frequently sensitive to position and temperature, they are
costly to produce, they require regular maintenance and adjustment, and they are more prone
to failure. For this reason, inexpensive and moderately priced timepieces with electronic
movements now provide most users with superbly accurate timekeeping and have almost
entirely supplanted older watch designs with mechanical movements (Wikipedia, 2007).
Nevertheless, the watch is distinct in the culture of consumer goods because it
incorporates both a concrete commodity, an object with genuine use value, and a signal
commodity, an object with representational value. In the community of consumer
goods, watches occupy in the early twenty-?rst century a position analogous to the
liminal condition Turner (1964) describes. Moreover, this liminal position, this
oscillation between use and signal values, in large measure accounts for the iconic
status of the watch, and sustains its distinct cultural resonance. Particularly in
contemporary American culture, the watch evokes a host of often-con?icting
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associations: those allied to work, productivity, enterprise, and success, on the one
hand, and those related to self-indulgence, status, luxury, and excess, on the other
hand. These con?icting associations reveal not only the long standing human desire of
wanting to having it – whatever “it” may be – both ways, but also the ambiguity and
play at the core of the postmodern cultural landscape. Moreover, a watch is never
“unmarked” – that is, to wear a watch or not to wear a watch delivers messages about
oneself, just as the watch one wears delivers a host of additional messages into the
environment one inhabits. As Csikszentmihayi and Rochberg-Halton (1981, p. 239)
found, things have their signi?cance less from their function than from “. . . the
information they convey about the owner and his or her ties to others.”
For most of its history keeping time has been the privilege of the powerful, a
mechanism used to keep order, to exercise control – from the monks’ observance of
Divine Of?ce in the Middle Ages to agricultural labor to work in the factory system to
the navigation of ships and the scheduling of trains to the synchronizing of military
operations from Waterloo to Iraq. From roughly the through the seventeenth century,
however, keeping time was the work of clocks maintained in towers at the village or
city center or from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries of clocks kept on the
walls of factories, of?ces, shops, and schools. To this day clocks remain the relatively
stationary prerogative of those who can afford them and, more to the point in
contemporary culture, of those who can impose them upon others. Pocket watches
emerge in the eighteenth century as a mark of early modern culture, a sign not only of
technical revolution but also of making portable a signi?cant power, taking control of
one’s self and environment into the world. Pocket watches steadily improved,
becoming less expensive (though never cheap as timepieces are today), and more
widely available through the nineteenth century, providing ample evidence that people
able to synchronize their efforts – be they military, commercial, educational, political,
missionary, industrial, or criminal – were people likely to accomplish their ends.
Clocks, as instruments of power, from their technically primitive beginnings
accrued, as do many such things, the ornamentation of wealth, from such conspicuous
signs of the source of power as the gold and enamel clock on the manor house mantle to
the imposing tower of Big Ben. As wealth bled into the middling classes in the
nineteenth century, ornament gave way to the craftsmanship of the grandfather clock
in the hall or the aptly named regulator clock on the wall, but the signs of wealth and
power remained clear even in this relatively austere cultural code. Watches, of course,
also bore the marks of ornamentation, as suggested in their role as the target of thieves
real and ?ctional and in their ability to de?ne the gentleman about town. To possess a
watch was as distinct a class marker as to own a carriage. But the core value of the
watch in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resided less in the pennyweight of the
gold case than in the function of its works which in turn promoted economic and social
mobility, and thereby served as an index of a man in and of the world. While the clock
marked the exercise of power in the ?xed environments of the manor house, the shop,
or the factory, the watch pointed to the exchange and other marketplaces. The watch
allowed one to take time into environments where time had not existed and to impose
its discipline. Moreover, the watch was a sign of social and economic fungibility,
became the physical sign of time and of the commodi?cation of time; that is, the
realization that, as Ben Franklin famously expressed the point, time is money and
money is time. The watch disseminated the work narrowly begun by the clock,
The watch as
cultural icon
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allowing time to be signed, as well as understood, as something to be consumed, as the
host of aphorisms that turn on “spending” time demonstrates. To one degree or
another – no doubt often naively – a watch signed a dispersal, even a democratization,
of agency. On balance, the clock signs control of others, while the watch signs a self at
work in the world.
The modern resonance of the watch retains many of these early modern
associations. The watch migrated from the vest pocket to the left wrist of of?cers
during World War I to meet the demands of the machine gun, a development extended
and democratized during World War II, as the watch increasingly became general
issue to GIs, a sign as well as tool of those engaged in matters of life and death, one
they took with them upon return to civilian life. By the mid-twentieth-century the
wristwatch was ?rmly embedded in modern consciousness as a sign of action and
work in the world. A watch, both as a practical tool and as cultural sign, was, for
example, the ideal high-school graduation gift, marking for most people entry into the
world of work and for others entry into nursing school, college, or some other
post-secondary training – environments where success depended upon one’s personal
capacity to keep time, to manage time, to use time, to exploit time. Before the advent of
the Timex, the graduation watch was an Elgin, Gruen, Illinois, Bulova, Longines, or
Hamilton – if one re poor, perhaps an Ingersoll or Baby Ben pocket watch –
representing a major parental investment. But whatever the brand or cost, the watch
represented a more signi?cant emotional investment, a declaration of con?dence. For
many years a new watch marked a new beginning, was thought to trigger crucial
processes of growth and development – a cultural burden now borne by the
acquisition of a new computer, which only incidentally keeps time powered by a
lithium battery. By the mid-twentieth century, the wristwatch came comfortably to
embrace contrary associations worthy of William Blake: the watch internalized the
social and economic controls of the clock, while the watch advanced the freedom and
self-direction of the pocket watch. On the one hand, the watch marked the reliability of
a team player, a company man, while, on the other hand, the watch depicted the
independence of an innovator, a corporate leader.
The Timex brought on dramatic change. As John Cameron Swayze “reported” in his
famous TV ads of the 1950s, the watch that “takes a licking and keeps on ticking,” did
usher in the mass production and marketing of cheap reliable watches, timepieces that
many corporate executives in the 1950s and 1960s conspicuously wore, at least in the
presence of their share holders. The Timex was a real James Cash Penny product.
Bulova’s introduction of the turning fork watch in 1960 remained an expensive
technical innovation, soon to be replaced in the mass market in 1970s by cheap quartz
analog and digital watches. At the turn of the millennium, the cost of these reliable
quartz movements, now manufactured principally in Asia, has plunged to remarkable
lows, nearly to a price point that may soon allow promoters to give away watches as
they now do ball-point pens.
An economics of pure utility would have spelled a disaster for the watch business,
but watches have always also traf?cked in the signal economy. “Fine watches” always
found a market where some relationship between the container and the contained
struggled to survive as makers sold increasingly reliable mechanical, often jeweled,
movements in expensive cases. As electronically driven quartz technology
democratized the watch’s works, the trade, beginning in the 1980s, aggressively
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fought back within the signal economy. The current extent of this effort is revealed in
the advertisements for very expensive watches in the early pages of just about any
edition of The New York Times, in a 66 page Sunday Times advertising supplement,
“Watch Your Time” (October 15, 2006), and in any number of an advertising magazine
called hr: Watches, the April 2007 (Vol. 10 No. 2) number of which runs to 96 glossy
pages where the boundary between advertisement and copy is extremely dif?cult to
discern.
The nostalgic appeal of “mechanicals,” as they are known in the trade, has been
extended into even more intricate “complication” watches, devices with, ironically,
almost as many functions as a cheap digital watch, often with the works exposed
through a clear back or to the face. The Rolex came into its own, as did such names as
Jaeger-le Coultre, Hubolt, Chopard, Girard-Perregaux, Pattek Philippe, TAG Heuer,
Baume & Mercier, among many others. Indeed, all of the luxury goods houses now
brand high-end watches: Tiffany’s, Cartier, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Mont Blanc, Movado,
Chanel, Burberry, again, among many others. And business is good. About 70 million
adults, more than a third of the US population, bought watches in 2003, almost
75 percent of them bought the watches for themselves. While 36.2 million buyers paid
under $50.00, 27.2 million paid $50.00-299.00, and 4.6 million paid over $300.00
(Research Alert, 2004). Between May 2004 and May 2005, more than 37,000 watches
sold at retail price points above $10,000, amounting to $ 730 million in business
(National Jeweler, 2007). Given the ever diminishing role of utility in watch ownership,
the vast majority of these watches, wherever one places the “price point” must serve, as
an industry web site expresses the point, “as an expression and extension of the
wearer’s personality” (Encyclope´die, 2007).
The extravagant excess of an expensive watch may be simply a mark of success or
an act of social aggression – classic conspicuous consumption. But watch wearing also
re?ects the “. . . autoreferentiality of all modern culture, which,” as Jameson (1998, p. 14)
expresses the point, “tends to turn upon itself and designate its own cultural
production as its content”. The watch now is less about time and management and is
increasingly about itself as a cluster of cultural signs. Watches, as are all cultural icons,
are mediating devices. The presence or absence of a watch is meaningful, as is the kind
of watch and the brand of watch one wears. Watches deliver a host of messages about
oneself to others. The watch, as do all icons, does this mediating work cultural work by
foregrounding the material. In an era where so much commodity production and
consumption is abstract, watches, ?rmly lodged in space and time, have a special
appeal, lending themselves to ritual and so to express in a non-verbal way something
that cannot be expressed in the controlling conventions of words. The savory irony
here, of course, is that the watch does this work by transforming this relatively
comfortable concrete reality into a resonate image.
Among those signs is a vestigial nostalgia for the mechanical in a culture
increasingly dominated by the electronic. “Technostalgia,” as this perception of earlier
forms of technology as simpler to use and having better quality is called, also evokes a
less abstract, less cognitively challenging cultural environment. Vic Muniz, for
example, who recently purchased a $25,000 A. Lange & So¨hne watch, is reported to:
. . . fetishize
wound every four days or so. And by virtue of a “skeleton” back the sapphire works can be
seen working away. “I always loved anything mechanical,” said Mr Muniz (Colman, 2007).
The watch as
cultural icon
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Complication watches really do cost a lot to make and a lot to buy, but one is buying a
mechanical curiosity rather than a timepiece, the twenty-?rst century equivalent of
the automatons popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such a watch is
an arti?cially constructed antique, which one is instructed to preserve as an heirloom
and add to one’s estate. These watches are sold as signs of family and status that most
buyers have never had but seek to construct.
Among those signs is connoisseurship. Most high-end watches at least aspire to
artistic design, often functioning as a wrist-worn objet d’ art. Many watches are nearly
impossible to read, but the crass utility of telling time, of course, is not the point;
keeping time is only an alibi for other cultural interests. The now famous Movado
watch aggressively dismisses time keeping for art, allowing its owners to enjoy the
radiance of the design on their wrists having been included in the collection of the
Museum of Modern Art. While the unique is ?nally not possible in consumer goods,
very high prices tend to reduce their dissemination, so to preserve the taste of the
buyer. Also among those signs is the watch as vestmentary code for the entrepreneur, a
sign of the audacity associated with this status. The watch best operates in this realm
by discarding associations with such mundane functions as keeping time or oversight
or management so to become the mark of insight or money or aggression – ?nally of
the transforming power of the people Thomas Carlyle called captains of industry. The
entrepreneur does not consult his watch; rather, he wears a watch, in a signal display
just as an eighteenth-century gentleman wore a sword or a nineteenth-century
gentleman carried a walking stick. Moreover, women, as they increasingly move from
the managerial to the entrepreneurial ranks are, as do men, buying these high-end
watches for themselves. As one TableBasee article reports, “The ultra high end:
Women’s watch sales catch up. Among the 31,000 luxury watches sold at prices
between $10,000 and 24,999, men’s watches accounted for 66 percent of sales, with ?ne
mechanical timepieces leading the way. But for watches as price points above $25,000,
women’s watches were catching up fast – accounting for nearly half (49 percent) of
the 6,200 ultra-high end watches that re sold during the 12-month period” (“Watch
sales growth” 2007). Other TableBasee items con?rm that women increasing buy
mechanicals for themselves.
A watch remains one of the few widely accepted jewelry options open to men, with
the aggressive practices of rap music stars and a few other celebrities emerging as
notable and very complicated signal variations. And until recently, watches at the
high end for women were swallowed in the category “jewelry,” functioned principally as
bling, often marking the subordinate status of women to the men who presumably gifted
the watches. But the watch nowextends the feminization of men and the masculinization
of women, extends gender complexity if not gender confusion. The increasing taste for
“mechanical” watches among women suggests the effectiveness this vestmentary code
in helping to de?ne the entrepreneur, man or woman. Oddly, the watch, a ubiquitous
element in the cultural landscape, advances individuality at a time when singularity is
under great pressure from forces that would homogenize us all. But the watch may be
one of those “retorparadoxes” that Jameson (1998, p. 52) describes, a convergence of
cultural forces such that an image conceals within itself, forces that will undermine
it. Once upon a time, a person ordinarily had, apart from a collection of jewelry,
one watch – at the outside two, perhaps one for work and one for play or one dressy
and one casua – that advanced one’s individuality, contributed to one’s de?nition.
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And very often that watch was a gift, possibly an unconscious de?nition of one’s self by
another. Today, the cheapness of watches has led to their proliferation, a ready collection
of signs to mark a wide variety of identities. But watches, the high and the low, even in
the face of their seemingly schizophrenic diversity, maintain a fundamental sameness.
The watch as an agent de?ning the individual carries in itself the very seeds of its own
displacement.
When – not all that many years ago in the scheme of things – the associations of
the watch were more closely allied to its use value, the watch was a cultural icon
bearing de?ning power and authority. But as the watch became more accessible, and
so more open to the interests of its signal value, the watch came to be more at home in
the indeterminacy and play at the core of postmodern culture. In one of the sweetest of
postmodern ironies, the watch has come to represent the postmodern concept of time –
the assault on both a sense of the past and a sense of the future. The watch has become
an icon, as Jameson (1998, p. 20) expresses this notion, of “the fragmentation of time
into a series of presents”.
References
Colman, D. (2007), “Note ready to wind down”, The New York Times, p. 9 (“Possessed” column),
28 January, Section 9.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. and Rochberg-Halton, E. (1981), The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols
and the Self, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY.
Douglas, M. and Isherwood, B. (1996), The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of
Consumption, Routledge, New York, NY.
Farrell, N. (2007), “Time runs out for the wristwatch: killed off by the phone”, available at: www.
theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article ¼ ¼ 28927 (accessed September 1, 2007).
Encyclope´die (2007), History of ?ne watches, available at: www.worldtempus.com/wt/6791/
(accessed September 1, 2007).
Jameson, F. (1998), The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998, Verso,
New York, NY.
National Jeweler (2007), “Watch sales growth in value: May 2005 vs May 2004”, National Jeweler,
Vol. 99 No. 15, Table Basee (accessed December 1, 2007).
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Vol. 22 No. 6, Table Basee (accessed December 1, 2007).
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of the American Ethnological Society, pp. 4-20, reprinted in Lessa, W.A. and Vogt, E.Z.
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Corresponding author
Dennis R. Hall can be contacted at: [email protected]
The watch as
cultural icon
11
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