The men trading their Rolexes for plastic sports watches
I recently attended a preview of an art exhibition at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire — yet it was something other than the sculptures that caught my eye.
Matt Gibberd, co-founder of boutique estate agency The Modern House, was dressed in rolled-up fisherman-style trousers, a navy knit jumper and a leather gilet with sheepskin trim, all from his wife Faye Toogood’s menswear collection. But on his wrist, instead of the classic analogue watch that would have polished off his carefully curated look, was a black plastic sports watch.
“It is quite a recent development,” he said as I collared him on the way to lunch. “I have a 1960s Heuer watch that I used to wear, but now it stays in the drawer. I started wearing a Garmin because I run, I like to track my steps, and I didn’t care about it in an emotional way. I can play with my kids, go for a run, go on a site visit and not worry that it will get scratched.”
Gibberd is not the only style-conscious man who has lately come to favour a sports watch for everyday wear. While once just for the sports bros — the kind of men who train for triathlons before breakfast — they now appeal even to men who have a wardrobe of expensive watches to choose from.
This shift towards a wider adoption of sports watches started during the pandemic, according to Kane McKenna, lead analyst on wearables at CSS Insight, when many of us started exercising for want of anything better to do. “Being able to track health metrics with granular detail gave people a sense of control,” suggests Matt Zara, strategist at WGSN Consumer Tech.
Daniel Crow, fashion-conscious co-founder of homewares marketplace Glassette, readily admits that half a decade ago he wouldn’t have pictured himself “wearing a black box on his wrist”. In 2021, however, he caved in and bought one, and now his prized Tudor Black Bay is permanently tucked away in a drawer while he wears an Apple Watch around the, er, clock — even if he’s out for smart evening functions. The appeal is, he says, “the benefits of the health tracking, which I find addictive.” He says that even for smart evening functions, he wears his Apple Watch; the only exception, “perhaps a summer wedding if I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt.”
Similarly, Jonathan Heaf, chief content officer of Soho House, says he would never have previously imagined wearing a sports watch “not to do sports in. I always felt that sports watches made you feel underdressed. Like wearing tennis shorts to a funeral.” But for the past year he has worn a TAG Heuer Connected sports watch, which, he says, “fuses aspirational luxury, design and functionality”.
TAG Heuer is one of the OG fashionable sports watch brands; it launched its Connected series, as it calls its sports watches, in 2015, the same year as Apple launched the Apple Watch; its latest multi-sports watch came out in January. Teddy Florent, managing director for the Connected Watch Business Unit at TAG Heuer, says its approach — unlike a straight-up sporting brand perhaps — is “design first; connected capability comes second.”
Since then, other design-led brands have followed suit, including Thom Browne, who collaborated with Samsung and Louis Vuitton, while brands including Garmin have met them halfway by offering more fashion-focused models, such the Vivomove Trend. “It’s a sign that these devices can be equal parts exercise tracker and status symbol,” Zara says.
The current preference for choosing a sports watch also seems to build on the existing trend for “affordable hype watches”, as Heaf terms it. He had already switched from full-blown flashy watches to ones such as the Casio G-Shock, which “in black, has the aesthetic echoes of a Audemars Piguet Royal Oak but at a smidgen of the price tag.”
David Jack, an aesthetic doctor who runs an eponymous practice in London’s Harley Street, agrees that the shift from ostentatious flashiness to a stealthier form of style is the reason he replaced his Rolex Day-To-Date (which was stolen from his gym locker) with his current Apple Watch, which sits neatly beneath a Brunello Cucinelli sleeve. “I used to really love luxury watches, however, I prefer to be much less flashy these days so wearing an Apple Watch is more understated and elegant in many ways.”
There is still a buoyant market for a traditional luxury timepiece. But for a significant subset of men, this just doesn’t appeal right now. Just as French President Emmanuel Macron was quick to correct reports that he was wearing a watch worth €80,000 during a TV interview about changes to the age at which French workers can retire, flashy luxury items are increasingly looking out of place amid a cost-of-living crisis. Jack says he has no plans to replace his Rolex with an equivalent watch; his sports watch does him just fine.
“The most stylish — and certainly the wealthiest of my acquaintances — are increasingly distancing themselves from outward displays of symbols of wealth,” Jack observes. “It has become quite crass to flash around a diamond-encrusted Daytona or Royal Oak.”
He adds: “For me personally, perhaps getting slightly older, or maybe just seeing the sheer volume of luxury goods that I see pass through the doors of my Harley Street clinic every day, the appeal of owning one of these seemingly commonplace items has diminished somewhat. Experiences have become much more important to me than objects.”
Gibberd says he has even downgraded his sports watch since he started wearing one, from a chunkier Garmin Forerunner 955, which “was too big and didn’t tuck away discreetly” to the brand’s smaller 255 version, “which sits unobtrusively under my sleeve. It’s all black and I think it has an aesthetic that just disappears, which I like.”
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