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kleinbl00  ·  397 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: GPHG's 2023 nominated timepieces

So there's a tension between utility and aesthetics with jewelry. My wife, for example, has to take her wedding ring off at work a lot because her hands go... sensitive places, shall we say but even in normie-land, crazy-stupid rings aren't uncommon. See also: earrings, bracelets, whatever.

This is especially problematic for accessories with nominal utility - belt buckles, pens and in particular, watches.

It's not uncommon to make cuff links out of lady's watch movements. It's highly uncommon to actually make them tell time. Cartier put a clock on a pen (I opted not to buy the straight line engine that made that pen) but it looks fucking stupid. The real problem is that the luxury industry is so completely compartmentalized that there's no real synthesis going on anywhere... and the places that do all their own stuff are invariably watchmakers, invariably male, and invariably fine purveyors of what I call womanbane.

There's a real love of mechanics for mechanics' sake and any attempt to make that oh, feminine or, you know, not fuggly is generally not attempted by anyone without a Y chromosome. Thus does the whole industry arc further and further away from the aesthetic sense of half the population. This is best illustrated by Richard Mille - the company has been run by the daughters of the founders for about four years now and yet the closest they can get to "aesthetically pleasing from a normie standpoint" is "how about pink." You have to keep in mind that for rank and file jewelers, "hinges" is a dark art...

...so you think they'd be blown away by shit like this but instead they hate on it and scream "kill the witch."