You’ve gotta hand it to Usher—the person merely doesn’t age. Not solely that, however his selection of matches is remarkably constant: Examine the image of him from final night time, accepting BET’s Lifetime Achievement award in a white blazer and denims, to at least one from the 2005 Soul Practice Awards the place he rocked…a white dinner jacket and denims. However what he wasn’t carrying 20 years in the past was a mind-blowingly stunning, classic Piaget watch from the Nineteen Seventies.
Sourced by the horological wizards over at Analog:Shift—the classic and pre-owned division of the retail big Watches of Switzerland—the timepiece in query is housed in a yellow gold case with an built-in bracelet in a basketweave sample, making it as a lot a chic piece of bijou as it’s a useful wristwatch. Its dial, in the meantime, is fully factory-set with pavé diamonds, with solely a delicate dauphine handset and the Piaget wordmark to disturb its elegant tapestry. Measuring 24mm in diameter, it incorporates a hand-wound motion.
For the previous few years, males have gravitated towards smaller and smaller watches. And we’re not even speaking about comparatively smaller watches—as in sub-40mm dive watches, or 36mm gown watches, the kind of fare that was as soon as thought-about normal. We’re speaking about dainty, sub-30mm, objectively teensy timepieces which might be largely nonetheless marketed to feminine clientele, even when a watch firm doesn’t divide its catalog into males’s and girls’s items. However within the grand pendulum swing away from the 47mm Panerais and the 44mm IWCs of the late ‘90s and early ‘2000s, trendy males appear to be gravitating towards the far finish of the dimensions spectrum, brandishing elegant little Cartiers, unisex Chopards, and, sure, itty-bitty Piagets.
Some males will inevitably discover this far-left quadrant of the diameter graph tough to abdomen, however we should always remind you of some key factors. Initially, the A-11, the hand-wound mil-spec watch of the American (and different) forces in the course of the Second World Struggle, measured roughly 31mm large. (It was made by a number of corporations and thus the case diameters weren’t utterly uniform.) Positively teensy, and but, it was worn by a military of hundreds of thousands of battle-hardened troopers. Secondly: A number of the most beautiful, artistic, downright stunning watches ever designed have been both fairly small, or they have been outright designed for ladies’s wrists, that means they’re hella small. Are you prepared to put in writing off a whole realm of horological magnificence simply due to a diminutive case diameter?
Clearly, Usher is just not. The person joins the ranks of the intrepid few who’ve been strapping on watches that experience the effective line between horlogerie and bijoux for the previous two or three years—males like Timothée Chalamet, Tyler the Creator, and Dangerous Bunny, who clearly don’t care concerning the males’s-women’s divide. (Or your opinion on it, for that matter.) Usher’s Piaget is an ultra-fine, left-of-center strategy to this significantly horological downside, however should you’re seeking to go small, then don’t overthink it: Seize your self a Tank Should, and be part of the ranks of the assured.