Rolex at retail prices

Ri_Nollaig wrote: »

Rolex itself was meant to be a 'tool watch', rugged and used for a purpose like diving. Getting it scratched and banged up was seen as normal and what created their name.

Well kinda, but not really either Ri. That's more of their marketing stuff really. Rolex was always an aspirational "suburban" brand aimed originally at middle class British people. That was its focus way more than Omega, Longines and the other mid tier Swiss brands who had much wider market focuses and markets. High tier stuff like AP and Patek weren't even on the radar of 99% of the buying public. Rolex was more anglophile than Swiss in nature anyway. It wasn't until the late 1950's it spread beyond that. James Bond wore one in the books, because the English author wore one. An American author of the same time writing an American secret agent almost certainly wouldn't have. When the films came out and the watch was featured it was focused on precisely because it was unusual for an average office joe man to wear such a watch and marked the character out as subtly different. It's used as a plot device. Something we'd miss today because of how the market and perceptions have changed. I don't know what the modern equivalent would even be? Maybe a normal looking chap wearing a dive computer in the office?

Tool watches themselves as a fashion thing are a relatively recent phenomenon. I say recent in the sense it was the 70's before they started to be seen as casual wear and really seen that way in the last 20 or so years(Rolex helped pioneer that with their advertising campaigns in the 70's). Before that they were rarely enough seen on the wrists of people who didn't use them for their actual trade or leisure pursuit. The vast majority of men wanting a "good watch" chose a dress type in gold or gold plate of the fashion of the day and bought them from jewellery shops. EG the Blancpain Fifty Fathoms which was the template for all the dive watches that followed originally wasn't sold through jewellers but through dive shops and sports outlets. It didn't really occur to them to sell them as everyday watches until the French company LIP who supported them started selling them through their extensive dealership network. Even then they don't seem to have been big sellers judging by the numbers of the early series that survive.

The "wear the tool watch of rugged men while striding through your office like a colossus" pretty much only happened thrice; first after WW1 when the companies were left with large stocks of the new fangled wristwatch to sell, so set their appeal as sports watches worn by racecar drivers and aviators and then in the 1970's, where explorers and divers were the thing. Then after the digital crisis when mechanical Swiss watches came back into play. Even so I'd bet the farm that Rolex sold far more datejusts and the like than Subs in the 1980's. Today I'd reckon of us all in here the majority of watches we own would fit into the toolwatch category.