On the morning of December 11, a young, nattily dressed, largely unmasked crowd streamed into the lower level of Phillips in midtown Manhattan for the 2021 New York Watch Auction, abuzz with the kind of anticipation you might expect in line for a concert. Phillips’s brand-new glass-box headquarters sits at the foot of 432 Park Avenue, the matchstick-thin luxury residential tower that teeters over a short stretch of Midtown commonly known as billionaire’s row but that might as well be called the watch district: On the same block are multilevel flagship stores for a number of coveted luxury watch brands, including Vacheron Constantin, Audemars Piguet, and Richard Mille, some of whose timepieces retail for seven figures.
The auctiongoers took their seats in the brightly lit white-walled room, iPhones at the ready to document what promised to be a momentous event. Just a few days before the sale, well after catalogs had been printed and shipped to collectors around the world, Phillips had announced a surprise first lot: a new Patek Philippe reference 5711 Nautilus sports watch, made in partnership with Tiffany’s, complete with a robin’s egg dial. The watch’s retail price was $52,635—spare change for the kind of big-game collector auction houses typically target. Earlier in the year, Patek Philippe (perhaps the ne plus ultra of luxury watchmakers) had sent the watch world into hysterics when it announced that it would discontinue the 5711, perhaps its most iconic model. The Tiffany’s iteration would be among the last ever produced. Patek made just 170 of them, so unless you were one of Tiffany’s 169 best customers, your only chance to buy one new was to bid on it this morning at Phillips.
The star of the event, aside from the watch, was the elegantly grizzled man behind the rostrum, Aurel Bacs, whose company, Bacs & Russo, has partnered with Phillips since 2014. Bacs is as close to a celebrity as an auctioneer can get, having presided over numerous record-shattering watch sales during the last 20 years at three major houses. Born in Zurich in 1971, Bacs has a flair for finding unique pieces and a genius for the coup de théâtre. In 2017, Christie’s sold an ultrarare watch previously owned by the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie. The same week, Bacs had presided over the sale of a Rolex that belonged to Vietnam’s last emperor, Bao Dai—it sold for almost twice the price.
His fondness for spectacle was on full display last December. Exuding a wolfish, Mitteleuropean charm, Bacs wielded his gavel like a baton, the room both his audience and his orchestra. Lot #1 started off pianissimo: Bacs opened the bidding at $20,000, less than half the retail price. Starting with such an unrealistically low bid is often designed to generate momentum before the real bidding begins.
Crescendo: Fielding bids from the dozens in attendance as well as from phone banks and thousands of online participants, Bacs effortlessly drove the price to six figures, then seven. His voice rising in intensity, he cajoled, teased, flattered, and prodded to coax the number ever higher. When bidding reached $4.9 million, Bacs turned to the sole paddle raiser left in the room—a young man standing by the stairs, in a white T-shirt and camel hair coat—smiled, and said, “You know what my ambitions are here, right? Come on…” to the delight of the crowd. When the laughter subsided, Bacs let a tense silence reign. A Phillips employee shouted “5 million!” on behalf of a phone bidder, and Bacs belted out a flamboyant “Bravo!” leading an exultant round of applause.
Fortissimo: Several minutes later, the bidding having stalled at $5,150,000, Bacs began to swing his gavel down with a flourish when a higher bid—made online from Miami—stopped it a few inches from the rostrum, interrupting Bacs halfway through the word sold. Amid the hubbub, Bacs wheezed and clutched his heart. The sale continued, as if bidders were as eager to keep watching the maestro as they were to win the watch.
Bacs’s hammer came down at last three minutes later. The lot went to an unnamed online buyer in New York City who had bid $5,350,000, handily setting a new record for a Patek Philippe Nautilus. With fees and commissions, the buyer would end up paying $6.5 million, more than 100 times the retail price.
Though the proceeds of Lot #1 went to the Nature Conservancy, the sale was nonetheless a marketing coup for Phillips, Patek Philippe, and LVMH, which owns Tiffany’s. Four days later, Jay-Z (a Tiffany’s brand ambassador) was photographed wearing one. Not long after, LeBron James showed off his own robin’s egg Nautilus on Instagram.
The watch would have sold high no matter what, but Bacs’s performance had turned it into a moment. “That was auction theater at its finest,” says a top watch-industry insider. “It was masterful in the way it was orchestrated. I think it was only when the final two bidders were going at it that we saw the real auction.”
In a dramatic twist, the transaction never went through. In late January, Phillips executive Paul Boutros told the watch site Hodinkee that the item was “unable to go to the original winning bidder,” providing no further explanation. Tiffany’s and Patek Philippe ended up deciding to sell the watch to Taiwanese actor and watch collector Zach Lu—the underbidder in the camel hair coat—for his final bid (plus fees): $6.2 million.
“IF YOU WEAR THEM, YOU’RE AN IDIOT”
The sale capped a triumphant year for Phillips, which in 2021 boasted the highest total watch sales of any auction house in history, at $209.3 million. Phillips’s competitors also had their best years ever, with Christie’s reporting $205 million and Sotheby’s $148 million, a 50 percent increase over the previous year and well ahead of pre-pandemic annual sales.
After growing rapidly for the last 20 years or so, interest in luxury watches—as in many other collectibles, from sneakers to trading cards to wine—exploded during the pandemic, as people around the world all of a sudden had extra time to scroll through product shots on social media and eBay, and extra savings to spend. Long a niche passion, luxury watches have become de rigueur for a broader, younger crowd, who thanks to the internet have quickly acquired specialized knowledge once limited to a small club of initiates.
Yet even as demand has risen, the top watchmakers have not significantly raised their retail prices or their output, out of caution and with an eye toward long-term stability. As a result, it is virtually impossible for someone who is not an established client to walk into a luxury watch retailer and buy a hyped model new. The industry speaks informally of a “50-year waiting list” for especially popular watches such as the Rolex Daytona, the Patek Philippe Nautilus, the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak, or the Vacheron Constantin Overseas. But “the reality is you can’t even get on the wait list,” says Eric Wind, a former vice president of Christie’s and founder of the Palm Beach–based high-end watch dealership Wind Vintage. “You’re just not gonna get it unless you’re a good pre-existing customer or a celebrity. Or if you’re doing under-the-table payments to the retailers on the side in cash.”
The only other way to jump the queue, if you’re desperate enough for one of those models, is to buy from a secondhand dealer or at auction. The upside to going this route is that you can find unique vintage pieces, some of which might previously have been owned by a movie star or a dictator and can connect you by the wrist to their aura. The downside is that the secondary market is rife with uncertainty: Dealers and auction houses almost never claim that their reports on condition, authenticity, and provenance are anything more than opinion. That makes it difficult to hold a dealer liable for misrepresenting the history of a watch.
The secondary market can also be a lot more expensive: If you buy a hyped model from a dealer or online, you’re almost certain to pay several multiples of the retail price. Auctions, by contrast, present an illusion of transparency. But watch experts say the major houses often know beforehand who is willing to bid what and rely at times on a variety of ethically dubious but hard-to-prove tactics—such as chandelier bidding, when an auctioneer pretends to see a raised paddle in the back of the room, which is a perfectly legal way of keeping the momentum going until a lot reaches its reserve price—to run up bids and inflate the final price.
Such market conditions have presented a dilemma for collectors who actually want to show off their popular models, knowing the message that will send to other connoisseurs. “If you wear them, you’re an idiot, ” says one collector. “Either you paid five times retail, or you bought it retail and you’re too stupid to have flipped it.”
Another reason not to wear one is to avoid attracting attention. In cities from Los Angeles to London, watch-related crimes have become particularly brazen during the pandemic. In Beverly Hills last March, in full view of the lunchtime crowd at Il Pastaio, three men in hoodies walked up to a man sitting at a patio table. One put a gun to the man’s head as the other two yanked off the watch he was wearing, a flashy Richard Mille RM 11-03 Flyback Chronograph, valued at $500,000. In the ensuing scuffle with the man, a jeweler named Shay Belhassen, a round went off and wounded a woman in the leg.
In Paris, meanwhile, violent watch thefts were up threefold last year, a phenomenon French police traced largely to a gang whose M.O. is to follow wearers of choice watches home and attack them. A task force was even created to combat the alarming rise.
“I think twice before wearing something in the subway or late at night,” says William Massena, a prominent New York–based dealer, collector, and watchmaker. Massena blames the crime wave on some of the same forces behind the increased popularity of luxury watches in general. “Because of celebrities and especially YouTube, thieves are much more watch-aware,” he says.
“For such a long time, celebrities were brand ambassadors and they were wearing what they were being asked to wear, but I have noticed recently that many celebrities are wearing vintage pieces and collectible pieces and pieces that they definitely went out of their way to get,” says Arthur Touchot, international head of digital strategy at Phillips. Touchot points to Michael Jordan’s German-made A. Lange & Söhne, and Tyler, the Creator’s vintage yellow-gold Cartier Crash, whose dial looks like one of Salvador Dalí’s melted clocks.
THE PAUL NEWMAN PAUL NEWMAN
That there’s a collector’s market for watches at all is thanks in large part to one of the biggest celebrities of the 20th century. In or around 1969, Joanne Woodward went to Tiffany’s in Manhattan to buy a $300 Rolex Daytona Cosmograph for her husband, Paul Newman. It was the first of several Rolexes she gave him; each bore an engraving that urged the actor and racing enthusiast to exercise caution behind the wheel. On this one, she had inscribed “Drive Carefully Me.”
Newman wore the Cosmograph for more than a decade, treating it like the functional object that it was. In the summer of 1984, his daughter Nell hosted her boyfriend, James Cox, at their home. One day, while Cox was working on the family tree house, Newman came by and asked him for the time. “I don’t have a watch,” said Cox. “I don’t know what time it is.” Newman handed him the Daytona. “If you remember to wind this, it tells pretty good time.”
By the mid-’80s, the market for mechanical watches had tanked. Battery-powered watches, introduced by the Japanese brand Seiko, kept time more accurately at a fraction of the cost. Their widespread adoption triggered what became known as the “quartz crisis.” After decades of steady refinement, intricately crafted Swiss watches like Newman’s Rolex, which depend on pendulums and the force of gravity, became essentially obsolete.
Having died as a practical tool, the mechanical watch became a statement of style and luxury. This renaissance started—naturally—in Italy. At some point in the middle of that decade, Newman appeared on the cover of an Italian magazine wearing the Daytona Cosmograph. The discontinued model, which had never been especially popular, became colloquially known as the “Paul Newman Daytona.” Now people had to have it. Vintage Paul Newman Daytonas had been going for a couple hundred bucks at flea markets. Now they were selling for thousands. After the watch disappeared from Newman’s wrist in photos, watch obsessives grew fixated with the idea of finding the original. The “Paul Newman Paul Newman,” as it was dubbed, became, in the ecclesiastical parlance of watch collectors, the first “holy grail.”
“That watch is the reason for the collecting community,” Touchot tells me over lunch in Geneva, by the Phillips office. “The community exists because of that one watch.”
Today the top watch buyers tend to come from China, with U.S. buyers trailing not far behind. But Italians continue to exert a disproportionate influence, primarily as tastemakers. One of the world’s most successful vintage watch dealers—known informally as the Big Boss, due to both his stature in the field and his frame—is the Italian-born Davide Parmegiani. I met Parmegiani, who is in his mid-50s, at his new boutique in Monte Carlo, where he sells both vintage watches and cars.
He arrived 30 minutes late. I asked him what drives the passion for watches, if not their ability to tell time.
“Sometimes I don’t even set the time on the watches,” he said. “If I want to look at what time is it, I can look at my iPhone.” He held up his smartphone: “This is the only exact time we’re gonna have,” he added.
Parmegiani is in a philosophical mood these days as he prepares to pass the business on to his son. “I’m very impressed by the passing of time,” he says. “And I think men, they cannot stop the passing of time, but watches”—he raises his wrist, flashing a vintage Audemars Piguet—“they give us the opportunity to admire it.”
There is perhaps no better illustration of the health of the watch business than Parmegiani’s personal car collection. After our interview, the Big Boss takes me to his garage on the lower level, where, in between Italian posters for Paul Newman racing movies, are about a dozen 1950s vehicles in mint condition, including Ferraris, Mercedes, and—his favorite—a Daytona Spider. (No relation to the Rolex model, but both are named for the Florida speedway; there is a well-established kinship between petrol heads and watch geeks, and Parmegiani is, as Newman was, a racing fanatic.) It’s only a portion of Parmegiani’s collection: “The contemporary [cars] are in another place,” he says. “Except I actually have the Pagani here”—a supercar sometimes worth more than a million dollars—“because it was here for service.”
Gazing over the assortment, I ask Parmegiani, who has homes in several cities, whether he thinks the current boom market for vintage watches is a bubble. He doesn’t believe it is, certainly not compared to fine art. “In the contemporary art market, there are very, very, very, very rich dealers,” he says. “You don’t find this kind of wealth in the vintage [watch] market.”
GOD’S TIMEPIECE
Parmegiani has witnessed the rise of watch collecting from its infancy. He estimates that he has handled “millions of watches” since he was 18, trawling for treasures at London’s Portobello Road flea market in the 1980s. And when prices at auction began to reach eye-watering levels in recent years, Parmegiani kept on bidding. As Italian pop played in his office, he recalled one of the most memorable sales he attended.
Almost seven years ago, he took a seat in the opulent ballroom of the Four Seasons hotel in Geneva, which hosted the Christie’s fall watch sale. For him there was only one lot that truly mattered that day: a previously unknown gold Patek Philippe 2497, made in 1954, with a black military dial and a perpetual calendar, meaning it automatically takes into account leap years and months with fewer than 31 days. It would have been a remarkable watch even if the description had ended there. But what made it practically sacred is that it had belonged to Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, who ruled for four decades before Marxist rebels toppled him in 1974. Rastafarians considered him the “God of the Black race.” Here was a chance to buy God’s timepiece.
Christie’s estimated the watch—engraved with Selassie’s imperial seal—to be worth between $540,000 and $1,080,000. Parmegiani was sure he would face stiff competition, but he wasn’t worried. “I knew I was going away with the watch,” he tells me. Before the auction, he had searched through his portfolio of clients to find one he deemed worthy of this watch. “Finally, I found an American friend of mine, he’s a very young guy, but he has a very good passion for rare things and rare watches. And he was the only one that told me, ‘Okay, Davide, we go for it. Buy.’ He didn’t give me any limit.”
The auction started slowly, but as Selassie’s 2497 approached, the room was packed, the energy palpable. Parmegiani wasn’t nervous. He had an ace in the hole.
After hammering in the previous lot, auctioneer Thomas Perazzi announced that the Patek Philippe had been withdrawn and attempted to move on to the following lot. The room lapsed into chaos. Parmegiani jumped out of his chair and demanded an explanation.
The explanation came later that day: At the last minute, it was soon revealed, Selassie’s descendants argued that the consignor of the watch was not its rightful owner and demanded its restitution. According to Christie’s, Selassie had gifted the watch to an “eminent African personality,” which Selassie’s family believed to be a reference to the former president of Sudan, Ibrahim Abboud. As the story is commonly told, the emperor gave Abboud the Patek Philippe in the 1960s to thank him for his help in mediating a truce between Ethiopia and Somalia. Some five decades later, Abboud’s daughter Salma had consigned it to the auction house. But the Selassies disputed this account of how the watch landed in Salma Abboud’s hands. Mel Tewahade, a representative from a group of Ethiopian American activists working with the family, told me that the watch was likely one of countless objects looted from the imperial palace after the 1974 coup in which Selassie was overthrown.
The watch was sequestered and the matter went to the Geneva courts, which, after an investigation, ruled that in the absence of information proving either claim, the sale could go ahead. The watch went back on the block in May 2017. With his unlimited budget, Parmegiani bought it for $2.9 million, making it one of the most expensive watches ever sold—with one of the most colorful backstories, the hint of scandal only adding to its cachet.
It would have been the event of the season had it not been for the sale that had taken place in Geneva just two days prior: another black-dialed gold wristwatch that had belonged to another midcentury emperor, Bao Dai of Vietnam. Across town at Phillips, Bacs had sold Bao Dai’s diamond-encrusted Rolex for $5 million, setting a new record for the most expensive Rolex ever sold at auction.
The sale helped establish the myth of Aurel Bacs. In 2002, as head of Phillips’s watch department in his early 30s, the auctioneer had sold that very same watch for $235,000, then as well a record price for a Rolex. Soon after, the rising star—who had begun his career at Sotheby’s—left for Christie’s. He helped take annual watch sales at the auction house from $8 million in 2003 to $127 million in 2013, when he and the company parted ways amid a disagreement over strategy. (Among other issues, Bacs was hesitant to embrace the push toward online sales, a fight he has since abandoned as evidenced by Phillips’s exponentially growing list of online bidders over the last few years.)
When Bacs returned to Phillips in 2014, restarting its defunct watch department, his approach, he has said, was to focus on quality over volume. He technically serves as a consultant under the auspices of Bacs & Russo, the company he formed with his wife, Livia Russo. In 2017, the same year Bacs sold the Bao Dai, the holy grail fell into his lap. More than 30 years after receiving it, James Cox was ready to sell the Rolex Daytona Paul Newman had given him, aware of its exalted status among aficionados. Though he and Nell broke up about a decade after the Rolex gift, they had remained close, and Cox decided to give a portion of whatever he’d earn for the watch to her charitable foundation, of which he is a board member. Through word of mouth, he was connected with Bacs.
“I don’t know how [else] we could have found it,” Bacs says, speaking by Zoom from his office in Geneva. “Like, ringing on every door in California and saying, ‘Hi, do you happen to have it?’ It was the Paul Newman that found us.”
When Bacs heard Cox’s story, he flew to Los Angeles to meet him—and it. “During dinner, I let him get a little peek of it on my arm,” Cox recalls. “He’s like, ‘You’re wearing it?’ ” Bacs knew he would have a chance to inspect the revered object more closely later, but that night at the restaurant, he couldn’t resist. According to Cox, Bacs asked to see the watch, pushed his plate out of the way, and pulled out his loupe at the table.
The Rolex was in rough shape, with scrapes and water damage, and a sunburnt dial attesting to a life well lived, out in the open rather than in a climate-controlled safe. If it had graced the wrist of anyone other than Paul Newman, Phillips might not even have accepted it in its condition. But since it was his, the wear and tear only added to the value.
The sale was set for the evening of October 26, 2017, in New York. An hour or two before, Bacs met with a collector who was so determined to own the watch that he tipped his hand. “He told me he might go as high as $4 million,” Bacs recalls. “I was like, Wow, that is an unheard-of amount of money for a steel Rolex. I thanked him and I bowed.”
A few hours later, Bacs was behind the rostrum at Phillips. He scanned the crowd and saw the eager collector at the front. Introducing the Paul Newman Daytona, Lot #8, Bacs said, “Without exaggeration, this is, to many here in the room…possibly the most iconic wristwatch of the 20th century.”
He wasted little time in kicking off the bidding.
“I have a commission bid at 1 million U.S. dollars that someone left with me earlier, who…”
“Ten million dollars, sir!” shouted a Phillips employee manning the phones.
Bacs, who was facing the other way, swiveled dramatically toward the phone bank like a summer stock Hamlet. His eyes met the collector’s. “He looked at me and I could read the letters WTF on his lips,” Bacs recalls. “Meaning, like, why did you not tell me? The guy didn’t stay in the race. He couldn’t even get his arm up. No, I didn’t see that coming.”
From that moment on, all the paddle raisers in the room were priced out. Proceeding for the most part in increments of $500,000, Bacs kept the phone bidding going at an energetic clip, occasionally lapsing into Italian, French, and German, all of which he speaks with no discernible accent. After 11 minutes, the bidding had reached $15.5 million. To thunderous applause, Bacs slammed his hammer. “It is history now!” With fees, the anonymous buyer would fork over just under $17.8 million, beating the record for most expensive wristwatch ever sold at auction by more than $8 million.
Cox was in the audience, sitting next to Nell Newman. “I think we were both somewhat in shock,” he says. “From what I know about the actual bidders, the underbidder tapped out—they hit their limit—but what I’ve been told was that whoever actually got the watch didn’t really have a limit, which meant it could have gone higher.”
If the watch were to return to market today, several people have told me that it wouldn’t fetch close to that price. “The Paul Newman at the end of the day is a $150,000 watch,” says a top watch specialist and former auction house executive. “As an example of the Daytona, it’s pretty shitty. That was just purely provenance, with market hype. And I think the market has evolved in its emotional intelligence.… If that watch showed up again at auction, I don’t think you’d even break $10 million. You’d be lucky to get $5 million.”
The stratospheric price it reached can be attributed in part to a frenzy of competitiveness in the room, a psychological phenomenon known politely as auction fever but that people in the industry simply call a pissing contest. Yet, it is a matter of faith among those I spoke to that Bacs’s auctioneering skills added several million dollars to the total.
“I really believe that he has a magic when he sells a watch,” says an industry source who knows Bacs well. “It’s a lot of smoke and mirrors, also,” he says. “And that’s fine with me. That’s what auctions are all about.”
SMOKE AND MIRRORS
Aside from his stagecraft, Bacs is admired for his ability to concoct a compelling narrative for the watches he chooses to sell. Like wine or art, collectible watches are vessels for stories. That is what much of their value derives from. And Bacs is, by all accounts, a formidable storyteller.
“After spending an afternoon with Aurel, I realize that I’ve been under the spell,” says one veteran watch journalist. “And I kind of have to deprogram myself.” A former colleague of Bacs’s argues that his ability to craft an attractive backstory for timepieces is precisely what makes him among the best at what he does. An auction house’s obligation, he says, is not to the buyer but to the seller: It is the auctioneer’s job “to market and sell the fireworks. The smoke and mirrors are not new to the auction world, but you’ve really seen it in the watch world over the last 20 years.”
Bacs, for his part, vehemently rejects the suggestion that his talent for storytelling amounts to spin. “I don’t want to be credited with being able to squeeze a stupid story out of any stupid watch,” he says. “When people say that Aurel can come up with a story for every watch, then it’s not quite right, because there are 999,000 watches that I cannot come up with a story [for]. Because there is no story. Because they are sad, boring, uninteresting, non-selling watches. Why people may say that is because we at Phillips only accept watches to our auctions when we think this one has a story to tell. We are refusing 90 percent of the property that is being offered to us. Some people call us arrogant, I call this selective.”
There are very few holy grails left. The original Paul Newman Daytona has been sold. So have the Selassie Patek Philippe and the Bao Dai Rolex. No one is sure what happened to the Omega Speedmaster that Buzz Aldrin took to the moon. But even if it were found, it would go straight to the Smithsonian.
That leaves just about one: John Lennon’s Patek Philippe reference 2499. A specialist familiar with the watch—but who won’t tell me whether he’s seen it in person or even knows of its whereabouts—says it “checks all the boxes”: spotless condition, unimpeachable provenance, and even without the connection to the musical legend, the 2499 is one of the most collectible watches ever made. If it were to come up for auction, say most experts, the John Lennon Patek Philippe would likely sell for more than $30 million.
To own that watch would be a way to commune with Lennon across time, to wear the object he wore on his chord-forming hand as he performed some of the most memorable songs of the last century.
Those who love watches often compare them to cars and art in terms of their emotional appeal. Like cars and art, they are also considered an alternative asset class, and in some categories their growth in value has well outperformed the stock market. Unlike cars and art, vintage watches are also portable and (to the untrained eye) discreet. It’s easy to sneak them past security, presuming TSA agents don’t follow @celebwatchspotter, which is not a given. As such, they can serve as a form of graft and be used in money-laundering schemes.
But this is not the reason watches cost what they do. Like any other collectible, luxury watches derive their value in part from the materials and man-hours required to make them, in part from their scarcity, and in part because other people think they have value, whether as a status symbol, as a piece of craftsmanship, or as a small bit of history. However inflated it might be, the watch market would collapse like a house of cards if it weren’t built on a solid foundation of passion.
“I imagine everyone you interviewed loved watches long before they were this popular and remembers being part of a very small community, but I don’t think any of us felt this was an unusual hobby,” Arthur Touchot told me in an email. Touchot got the bug as a teenager and worked as a journalist for Hodinkee before he joined Phillips around the time of the Paul Newman sale. “We didn’t think we were crazy for loving watches…. If anything we thought others were crazy for not feeling the same way.”
This story has been updated.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the timing of the 2017 sale of a Rolex that had belonged to the Vietnam emperor Bao Dai. That sale took place two days before the sale of a watch that had belonged to Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassi, not two days after.
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