The Man Who Sparked The Watch Boom

Why are classic timepieces suddenly more sought-after, more Instagrammed, and more valuable than ever before? The answer has a lot to do with auctioneer Aurel Bacs, who’s using his own peculiar passions to engineer a global craze

- Cam Wolf

The watch that Aurel Bacs is tenderly holding in the previous spread is ruined. Well, technically. The once crisp and pristine black sub-dials that arch along the bottom of the Rolex Cosmograph Daytona are now the color of a dirty old coin, the result of years of exposure to the sun. The watch is ancient, tarnished, decayed. But Bacs is rapturous.

Bacs is a preternatural optimist when it comes to timepieces. He’ll describe this one as ‘tropical’ as if it were a beach-bumming brunette whose hair had charmingly lightened over a lazy summer. With his loupe – the small magnifying glass used by jewelers – he goes in for a closer look. ‘The dial is insanely beautiful,’ he says, sounding like a proud father. And when Bacs deems something beautiful, many others adjust their vision to see it just as sweetly.

And in this, he is unique. While his colleagues in the jewelry or art department wouldn’t exactly be delighted by a sun-damaged or a banged-up timepiece, Bacs finds something wonderful in the defects.

To his eye, the marks imbue a great watch with a special ‘graciousness, that it’s survived the test of time,’ he says. Then, suddenly given to understatement: ‘It’s partly philosophical.’

During a panel discussion in December, Bacs wandered into a fantasy. ‘Whenever I turn a watch around and it says, “With Love, from Dad and Mom,” within a second I’m sort of zooming away and I start thinking, “Where are Dad and Mom today, and where is the recipient of the watch?”’ Bacs wants clients to feel a watch’s life, to imagine themselves as the next link in the chain – and then to pay handsomely for the privilege of such stewardship.