Wind It or It Dies

Pharrell Williams apparently wore a skull-faced pocket watch from the German brand DETOMASO and it completed his outfit. I believe this completely. There’s something about a pocket watch that still carries a specific weight—it implies a relationship with time that wristwatches quietly abandoned somewhere in the twentieth century. You have to reach for it. You have to want to know the time badly enough to dig into a pocket and pull out a chain. It’s a minor ritual, but rituals accumulate meaning.

Their Tasca XXL is a hand-wound mechanical pocket watch with a double-transparent case and a glass back that lets you watch the movement doing its work. 53mm of stainless steel, a 40cm chain with a clip, a subdial for the seconds. It comes in black, silver, or gold. The hand-wound mechanism is the part that interests me most: you wind it, it runs. You forget it, it stops. There’s an honesty to that dependency that battery-powered watches can’t replicate—it needs something from you, daily, or it goes quiet.

The Inchiostro sits at the opposite end entirely: flat, digital, an e-ink display with almost no visual weight. Where the Tasca XXL announces itself, the Inchiostro disappears. Both are making an argument about what a watch should feel like on the body, and those arguments are genuinely contradictory. I respect the range.

Pocket watches have been drifting back into circulation for a while now, mostly worn as a quiet signal—a statement about pace, or about refusing the reflexive wrist-check that wristwatches have turned time into. Whether that reads as affectation depends entirely on the person wearing it. On the right person, reaching into a vest pocket for the time looks like the most natural thing in the world.