WOW FACTOR

We bring our odyssey in 2020 novelties to a close with a few punchlines. This list of fun tickers is a tribute to the many watches of 2020 that sparked joy

- ASHOK SOMAN

Watchmaking’s top executives have a story they like to tell. The story tends to take on different forms depending on who’s doing the talking, but the message is always the same. To unpack it and cut ahead a bit, this is how it goes in one sentence: time is a friend that is on your side, or at least it could be if only you had the right watch. It does make for a pretty sweet pitch to anyone already toying with the idea of getting a nice watch, while needing some justifications. After all, no one wants to be a slave to time. To put it another way, we all want to be in charge of our time, despite all evidence to the contrary. When you get yourself a (likely and relatively) expensive watch, you definitely want it to set you apart from everyone else. In a matching move to reinforce this idea, watch collectors typically talk about smartwatches (typically affordable) as pedestrian tools or even as an extension of the stress-inducing digital world we are immersed in.

One watchmaking brand even went with a stunningly literal interpretation of this, with a timepiece that literally allowed you to stop and restart time whenever you wanted. As distinctive as that was, this brand is far from alone in playing charming little tricks with the space-time continuum. Of course, the beauty of the Hermes Time Suspended piece was that the watch kept track of time even when its display of time was, well, suspended. Yes, the name turns out to be quite literal after drawing you in with questions, but we have more to say on naming conventions elsewhere in this section on fun with time.