Why men are wearing tiny watches now

To be precise, what we’re talking about here are watches that slip below 30mm in diameter. Or even 20mm. Cartier’s Alice in Wonderland Tank Mini is a barely-there 16.5mm across and yet, on launch, it was Ben Clymer, founder of Hodinkee (the uber-masculine online watch portal once valued at $100 million) who appeared most smitten by it.

For comparison, and since we’re counting, compare those dainty figures with classic men’s watches such as the Omega Speedmaster Professional at 42mm, or the Rolex Explorer at 40mm. Or, if we’re going proper Kleenex Mansize, Panerai’s Luminor Marina, a gargantuan 47mm steel hulk popularised by Sylvester Stallone in the Nineties.

This will astonish you, but these days the question of what makes a man’s watch splits opinion. On one side, the style progressives pushing pint-sized timepieces; on the other, the watch bros who prefer their timepieces big and heavy enough to oblige an all-day triceps flex.

Naturally, they’re both wrong. And here’s why.

Early in my career, I interviewed a watch retail veteran by the name of Owen Sheridan. He had worked for Watches of Switzerland for decades by then and was a wonderfully avuncular sort of a man, determinedly pinstripes and red braces, despite the oncoming winds of relaxed luxury. In those days, circa 2005, luxury watchmakers were in an arms race to see who could sell us the biggest watch. Hublot’s 44mm Big Bang of 2005 had put the fat cat among the po-faced pigeons and suddenly a stone-cold sober industry that had been defined by discreet Patek Philippes and slimline Vacheron Constantins found itself in a mad rush for wrist real estate.

The peak came in the mid-Noughties, when Omega landed a 49.2mm version of its otherwise gloriously demure Seamaster Railmaster, a watch so large it might have doubled as a helipad. But it marked the beginning of the end. The 2008 financial crisis followed soon after, bringing with it an existential moment that sent consumer tastes and watch design spiralling, along with the banks and what little was left of voter trust in the establishment.

Sheridan had seen it coming. “Mark my words,” he had said a few years earlier, “the perfect size for a man’s watch is 39mm. Sizes will go up. Sizes will go down. But if you buy a 39mm watch, it will always be fashionable.”

In the near 20 years since, I have come to recognise this as Sheridan’s Law, as reliable as any claimed by Newton, Einstein or Sod himself. I’ve called on it on countless occasions when advising friends on a men’s watch purchase.

And it applies no matter the price. Just the other day a friend asked me for my approval on a 42mm Timex with a black coating for her son’s 14th birthday. I quickly pointed her in the direction of a 40mm steel piece — Sheridan’s Law allows for a mill in either direction — by the same brand. It looks terrific on the boy and it will look terrific on him when he’s a young man applying for his first job years from now.

The Weeknd wears a ladies’ Piaget Limelight Gala; Bad Bunny has a 28mm vintage Patek Philippe

ANDREW D BERNSTEIN/NBAE, STEPHANE CARDINALE/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES

Tyler, the Creator wears a Tank Louis Cartier; Paul Mescal with his Cartier Mini Tank

LONDON ENTERTAINMENT/GC IMAGES, KARWAI TANG/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES

Clearly, I struggle with the small-watch craze, just as I struggled with the wrist-clock hubris of two decades ago. It may be personal. Standing almost two metres tall I can’t claim that a dinky-toy timer looks anything other than laughable on me.

“But history!” you may say. And you’d have a point. Early men’s watches were indeed smaller than they have been so far this century. I have my grandfather’s 1940s Rolex Air-King, which at 34mm looks quaint at best on my wrist.

History, though, quickly showed the inadequacy of smaller watches, which were harder to read and often less reliable, such were the technical limitations of creating robust mechanisms that would fit into smaller case sizes. Now, like our cars and our mortgages, watches are just bigger.

Maybe this case-size confusion is somehow allied to the culture wars. Are these tiny-watch-wearing men anxious to appropriate female tropes as a shield against accusations of the wrong kind of masculinity? Or is it just a Gen Z thing, incomprehensible to anyone who remembers the 1990s?

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Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps I should defer to Brynn Wallner, creator of the zeitgeisty watch style platform Dimepiece. “The men choosing small ladies’ watches wear them almost as if they’re pieces of jewellery,” she says. “That might sound sacrilegious to the horological purists, but the idea of masculinity is being reconsidered and it’s now perfectly acceptable for men to wear little bags, nail polish and pearl necklaces. Think Jacob Elordi with his tiny Bottega or Harry Styles and every twentysomething boy on TikTok.”

The refrain backing that up inside the largely impermeable watch community dome is that “a watch is a watch”, and in a way there’s an unquestionable logic behind the sentiment. But that feels more like a reaction to culture rather than a reflection on the eternal values of proportion, mass, balance and context — a designer’s obsessions.

After all, who in their right mind would put 12in wheels on a Land Rover Defender? It’s like all those new-builds with the criminally small windows currently being scattered across the countryside.

And so I wonder whether, in what we’re now to believe is a post-woke era, the pendulum of fashion has already begun its inevitable lurch back in the other direction — and towards the perfect 39mm men’s watch. Sheridan’s Law always applies.