The watch industry has always displayed a strong streak of economic irrationality. After all, you can buy a Casio digital watch for £5 that will tell the time more reliably than a mechanical Patek Philippe Grand Complications costing 40,000 times as much.
As the advertising slogan goes, every watch tells a story. And the story the watch industry tells is that millions of people will pay a massive premium for style over function. Or, as Ralph Lauren put it rather more poetically, a fine watch, like a well-designed car, is best appreciated as “moving art”.
Still, economic irrationality has its limits. And the Apple Watch has been mercilessly exposing them by offering a radically different type of functionality and a very different kind of style.