When Perfection Becomes Cheap, Nothing is Perfect
How Luxury Must Evolve
The luxury watch industry has spent the last decade ramping up towards mechanical perfection — and in doing so, has accidentally exposed its own existential crisis.
Historically, watches were luxurious not merely because they looked good, but because they were hard. Inner anglage, black polishing, flawless bevels: these were brutally time-consuming manual skills, achievable only by a handful of trained artisans. They weren’t finishing flourishes; they were badges of labour, investment, and mastery. Laborious perfection was the dividing line between the haute horlogerie elite and the merely good.
But as brands ramped up production volumes, something had to give. To maintain profitability, they quietly began to edit the standards: rounding out inner corners, simplifying bridge architecture, machine-finishing surfaces. They traded the invisible hours of bench work for the hum of line production. The story of handcraft remained in the bewitching storytelling — but increasingly disappeared from the watch itself.
Fast forward to today. Thanks to advances in multi-axis CNC machining, robotics, and micrometric manufacture, we now inhabit a watch world where the “visual markers” of artisanship can be mass-reproduced.
It reminds me of The Incredibles, where the villain Syndrome (previously Incrediboy) dreams of giving everyone superpowers — because, as he sneers, “When everyone’s super, no one will be.” That’s precisely where luxury watchmaking now stands: when everyone can machine perfection, perfection itself ceases to be special.
This collapse isn’t limited to finishing. Once upon a time, complications like the perpetual calendar were the high priests of haute horlogerie. A perpetual was a marvel: a brain-teaser in brass and steel, assembled and meticulously tuned by hand. Today? Brands can offer mass-assembled perpetuals for a fraction of the historic price. And tourbillons — that most intricate of escapements, once the preserve of only the very best — now arrive daily from Chinese factories at prices lower than a decent mechanical chronograph.
Thus the real existential question: if a watch can look beautifully finished, boast impressive complications, and yet be the product of automated processes and industrial economies of scale — what, exactly, is luxury anymore?
Luxury, if it is to remain credible, must evolve. It can no longer lean lazily on finishing tropes mass-produced by CNC mills and polished to sterility. It must lean into the things machines still can’t fake: authenticity, imperfection, and emotion.
Authenticity means proving the human hand is still there — visibly, undeniably. It means engraving that is clearly hand-pushed, not laser-burnt. It means bevels that have the gentle, organic inconsistency of a master artisan at work. Brands must show their process — not just parade the shiny result. If you can’t tell the truth about how your watch was made — if your story involves little more than “we pressed ‘Start’ on the CNC” — you’re dead in the water.
Imperfection is not a flaw; it might be the new signature of luxury. True handwork will always leave behind tiny deviations, subtle asymmetries that tell you a human soul stood behind the tool. If your dial enamel is absolutely flat and identical across 10,000 units, congratulations: you have made an industrial product. Luxury should wear its humanity like a badge, not hide it behind sterile precision.
But then, even imperfection can be faked. Machines today can randomise brush patterns, vary polishing pressures, even simulate hand-applied enamel “errors” to create an illusion of individuality. It’s Fight Club’s artisanal IKEA glassware all over again: factory-made chaos, sold as character. In watchmaking, as in life, it’s no longer enough to see variation — you have to know where it came from, and who put it there.
And most critically: emotion. As mechanical watchmaking’s technical ceiling gets ever higher (and easier and cheaper to reach), the brands that will survive are those that build watches that mean something. An emotional connection to a historical lineage, an emotional response to daring design, or simply a feeling of wonder at seeing a real artisan’s hand at work.
What will die — what deserves to die — is the cynical mechanical peacocking. A tourbillon finished by a fleet of CNC mills is just as spiritually bankrupt as a quartz movement in a diamond-set case. Surface doesn’t save you. Truth, content, artisanship, and soul do.
Brands today have a choice. They can lean into mechanised perfection, pumping out sterile beauties with all the emotional depth of a laminated kitchen worktop. Or they can get brave: make things that risk imperfection, that expose the hand of the maker, that invite a relationship between the wearer and the worn. They can resist the cheap, addictive pull of machine-made “wow,” and rediscover the slower, harder magic of craft.
The truth is, the watch world doesn’t need more technical tricks. It needs more soul. It needs brands willing to show not just what they made, but how — and why. It needs watchmakers who understand that in the rush to make everyone “super,” the real art lies in the humanity.
Luxury must remind us why it mattered in the first place. It was never really about just owning “the best”; it was about owning something human in a world becoming ever more commoditised.
Machines can build perfection. But when perfection is everywhere, it becomes meaningless. True luxury is a scar, not a sheen.
In a discussion group of watch enthusiasts, the topic of guilloche dials frequently arises. On one occasion, a member of the group mentioned with mild
disappointment on imperfections they noted when examining two watches, one a Shapiro dial and one a Kari V dial, presumably both examined with loupe magnification.
Count me as a fan of imperfections borne of the human hand for the reasons you describe above.
On a loosely related note, I think back to Internet marketing in the mid to late 2000’s. Bear with me here, this is going somewhere.
Facebook had recently begun on their platform and ad network to include thumbnail images with the ads in contradistinction to Google ads, which were text only.
I knew several Internet marketers who ran extensive A/B testing on their ads with various images of the always popular “attractive female.” Several marketers I knew at the time found that with testing clear, sharp, distinct images of attractive women did not convert into clicks as well as images of an attractive woman that were just barely out of focus or slightly off-center or otherwise not completely as sterile nor pristine as a stock photo.
If this holds true in other domains, including the appreciation of watch faces and movements, then perhaps it suggests that there is something jarring to our subconscious when we’re presented with an image that is essentially perfect and symmetrical. Perfect symmetry rarely occurs in nature and perhaps seeing it is subconsciously jarring.
Excellent write up once again, thank you for composing it and sharing it with us all.👍
I was reminded of an (increasingly) agéd post by dear ol' Jack:
"The simplest and most original notion of luxury that I can think of, can probably be articulated by the expression that something is luxury, which takes as long as it takes to make, and costs as much as it costs. In all of the places in which luxury originated, whether in Europe or the cradles of civilization in the near and far East, luxury goods were more or less anything that was rare and costly for one of two reasons, and often both: inherent rarity of materials, and inherent difficulty of craft." (https://www.jackjforster.com/new-blog/2018/9/15/a-theory-of-luxury)
Which is not to gainsay your premise outright—you and JF are very much on the same page re: the struggles of modern luxury to justify its own existence—but to use that excerpt, plus a nod to Walter Benjamin's "Das Kuntswerk im Zeitalter..." to reframe the problem somewhat.
I would propose that the issue, at punning base, is that the time-worn Forsterian plinths of rarity and difficulty upon which the striding colossi of the horological world presently stand are a bit the worse for wear. Mass-consumer recreations run rampant, and precision manufacturing has made perfection a mere computational concern, and readily attainable at that. Just so, firmer rhetorical footing is sought by reconsidering the modern "luxury" watch as a singular work of art with a specific and "authentic" aura (tip o' the hat to WB) that is diluted or lost when produced at scale or—heaven forefend—made available to the unwashed masses via the dark magicks of mechanical reproduction, a revanchist standpoint that willfully ignores the explicit purpose of the watch as a functional consumer good that derives no small benefit from standardization and industrialization, particularly with regards to regulation, repair, and upkeep. This new(ish) emphasis on an only ever vaguely-defined aura tends to conflate the various decorative arts which find their home in the finished product with the practical purpose of the thing itself, elevating polished chamfers and ornate engraving to the point where (arguably) de trop ornamentation becomes the raison d'être of the whole endeavour rather than the proverbial gilding on the dial. Grand complications aside, when the focus of the loupe is trained squarely on the execution of superfluous aesthetics, l'maisons de l'haute horlogerie (and their heirs amongst the independents) must needs spend more time polishing their tiny bits than developing and fine-tuning their movements. Innovation has been ceded to the industrialized: a fair play when the bored aesthetes need their shiny baubles, tout de suite.
Overwrought metaphors and polyglot preening aside, I would also argue that the real humanity of a watch comes from its wearing (and wearing-in), which holds true of the mass-produced and the handcrafted alike. Their aura is bestowed; that is our doing, and enjoyable regardless of origin.