the hours; With the current craze for estate jewelry, vintage watches have become fashion's latest prey.(narrative)(Column)

Byline: Tim Blanks

On a crowded flight from Nice to London, a fellow passenger leaned across the aisle and eyeballed my wrist in amazement. "I've never seen another like it," he said as he offered his own wrist, with a watch identical to mine. This was the day I realized that watch collectors were a hermetic order unto themselves. He then went into esoteric raptures about the rarity of the horological specimen we both sported.

Who knew? I bought my Rolex because I liked its charcoal-gray face: more allusive than plain old black, more sophisticated than the Dresden-blue face that originally caught my eye in the window of a little shop in Milan called Passatempo. Unfortunately, there was no English spoken inside, so all I got from the owner while I was making my purchase was that my watch was very parteecular. And it wasn't parteecularly expensive. Rarity means much more than price to true collectors. "Onedownmanship" I've heard it called.

Except, of course, that rarity now also inflates price, especially as those little covens of old-school obsessives find themselves competing with an enthusiastic new breed of collector, whose appetite for luxury and yen for the unique find satisfaction in treasures from the past. And there's a lot to be said for the thrill of the chase, following an insider's tip (the Hermes of watch straps is apparently to be found on the rue St-Hyacinthe in Paris) or spending a languid afternoon debriefing a dealer on Bond Street or Madison Avenue or the rue Saint-Honore. I found Costas Kleanthous on Portobello Road. The exterior of his shop is deliberately downbeat to disguise the fact that inside is a trove of gorgeous arcana-mostly watches but also Art Nouveau and Deco jewelry. The courtly, avuncular Kleanthous had recently spent one of those leisurely afternoons with an English couple, the wife adding her two cents as they put together the perfect capsule collection of seven watches for the husband, from a rose-gold men's watch by Patek Philippe from 1942 to a classic Memovox by Jaeger-LeCoultre. Kleanthous told me that, as yet, there were few women among his 600 watch collectors ...