The WSJ and Luxury Watches

One of the great things about Portfolio magazine is that it has, so far, managed to avoid any kind of feature article on the subject of high-end watches. Any reader of high-end glossies aimed at rich businessmen is by this point intimately familiar with the pornography of wristwear: objects which apparently transcend their "watch" status to become "timepieces" in much the same way as high-end apartments invariably become "residences". As often as not these articles are written by Nick Foulkes, a man who I imagine regularly dashing off a thousand words on different types of tourbillion before breakfast.

Of course, these articles aren't written to be read, they're written to attract advertising from watch manufacturers. And so they all have an astonishing sameness to them: they wonder at craftmanship, they extoll technological prowess, they explain that expensive watches are genuinely collectible and can often rise in value over time. The one thing they never do is cast a remotely critical eye on the industry.

And so we encounter the fact that this weekend, the Wall Street Journal ran an 11-page advertising section devoted to collecting and investing in luxury watches. But it waited until Monday, after all those ads had run, to put on its front page (not the Pursuits or Weekend sections, mind, where articles on watches normally appear) an investigation of how Patek Philippe and other watchmakers bid on their own product at auction in order to create the illusion that there's actually a secondary market for these things.

It'll be interesting to see whether Patek Philippe stops advertising in the WSJ as a result of this story. On the one hand, the paper has tarnished the brand's reputation. But on the other hand, it was careful to do so outside the sections where buying watches is something worthy of feature-length examination in and of itself. So long as such articles don't appear directly opposite ads for luxury watches, everything should be OK, no?