2025: A vintage year for luxury watches

In this discussion with Charles Tearle, Head of Watches at international auction house Lyon & Turnbull, Howden’s Joshua Meadowcroft explores how the next generation is turning to vintage watches and the important considerations when it comes to insurance.

I'm very confident for 2025. Over the past two decades people were saying ‘the wristwatch is dead’ because the next generation has so much information on smartphones and smartwatches – but it’s gone completely the other way.

People surrounded by tech are instead looking at personal, intrinsically interesting watches, perhaps a luxury classic.

Back in the late 1960s, Cartier London made a watch called Crash, which looked as if it was inspired by Surrealist artist Salvador Dali’s ‘The Persistence of Memory’ melting clock. Cartier sold it as a variation of their best-selling oval-cased watch, the Baignoire. Crash watches were handmade and very few were produced.

At the time, Crash watches cost into the thousands but there was little demand. Now, if I had one from the late 1960s in auction today, I would expect it to make in the region of £1 million.

In 1991, a limited edition of Cartier Crash watches were made and they sold at around £25,000 each and stayed at that sort of figure for decades. Now that 1991 model would be £250,000.

American rapper and songwriter Kanye West wears a Cartier Crash and that is creating more interest. His 1991 ‘Paris’ re-edition, from a limited edition of 400, has a slightly smaller case than the original London version.

I also noticed that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has a phenomenal watch collection which he’s built up only over the last year. Among the watches he has been seen wearing is a vintage 18-carat yellow gold Rolex Daytona Cosmograph ref 6239, known as the Paul Newman. That’s a real change as the Silicon Valley tech crowd didn't wear watches and that was across the board. So, yes, we are generally seeing a much younger generation coming to buy watches.

There are two types of buyers for vintage watches; those who want exceptional, 95 percent condition watches that will be put in a safe for an investment, and those who want to wear their watch and so don't have to buy something that's absolutely perfect.

Buyers should remember there’s no point in buying something absolutely pristine if they intend wearing it as the watch will scratch and then be no longer pristine.

Everyone has a dream

Buying vintage watches is an aspirational thing. A lot of people of a certain generation will want something that they aspired to as a teenager or their parents aspired to or owned.

For me, it was always Magnum Ferrari cars. If I won the lottery tomorrow I wouldn't want a new Ferrari, I would want that Magnum Ferrari because it was the car I aspired to own when I was a teenager.

So, when you go back to, say watches from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, buyers get tremendous pleasure from that era. They also can get good value, high quality and variation in terms of how that watch has survived over the years.

This is where Cartier tends to be the big one in the vintage watch world. It has become incredibly popular because it has always been something that people aspired to own but couldn't – an elegant, luxury classic. The watches are a smaller size and that has come back into vogue for men and women.

Certainly the younger generation have gone back to a slightly more elegant look where men and women are wearing the same watches.

In our Cartier Curated auction on April 29, 2025 we have an early 1970s’ Cartier 18k gold reversible wristwatch. It has two movements with two dials so it’s like a dual time zone, but actually it uses two separate movements. It's incredibly rare and the estimate price is £25,000-£30,000. The sale coincides with a major exhibition at the V&A Museum in London that charts the evolution of Cartier's legacy of art, design and craftsmanship since the turn of the 20th century.