Where It Started, and How I Actually Wear the Collection

Every month I open up the AMA on Instagram and let you all ask whatever you want. This round of questions ended up circling something I don't usually talk about in one place: where this whole thing started, and how I actually live with the collection day to day. So here's the origin story, plus a handful of quick answers on wear, rotation, and vintage that came out of the same batch of questions.

Where It Started, and How I Actually Wear the Collection

My father always wore a watch. Nothing extravagant, but when he was ready for a new one, he made an event of it. We'd go around and try on a stack of them together. I didn't know it at the time, but that ritual was shaping me.

My first two watches came from money I earned at a bagel shop and a newspaper route. A DKNY and a Fossil. I'd never shown either one on Instagram until I dug them out of a drawer at my parents' house recently. Here they are, the actual watches, still sitting exactly where teenage me left them. I wore that pair through high school and college. Thought I was the man walking into my first internships with a Fossil on my wrist.

Then came the Panerai. I just had it restrapped after years on its original band, which by the end looked properly vintage in the beat up sense, not the good sense. The lugs on that thing use an old hook style that fought us the entire way through the job. It's on a brand new strap now, and it's not changing again anytime soon.

Father, then the DKNY and Fossil, then the Panerai. That's the actual lineage. Everything else in the collection came after, which brings up a handful of questions I get asked constantly about how I actually live with these watches day to day.

How do you choose what to wear each day? It's dictated by the day itself. What I'm doing, what I'm wearing clothes-wise, and I fit the watch to that. Occasionally I flip it and start with the watch, building the outfit around it instead. Where I work isn't a watch culture and it isn't a showy one either, so most of the collection simply doesn't belong there. The room decides more than I do.

Do you track wear, and do pieces rotate out? Every watch I wear gets logged across a couple of apps. Some pieces get constant rotation, others barely get touched, and if something sits too long without wrist time, it tends to move on eventually. Not always though. I still own one of the first watches I ever bought. I rarely wear it, but it stays because it means something, not because it's earning its keep the way the rest of the collection has to.

Does the whole watch have to work, or can one detail carry it? A watch is the entire visual package to me, not a single standout feature. If something about it doesn't sit right, I pass, full stop. If it does, I lean all the way in. What doesn't work for me might be exactly right for someone else, and that's most of the fun in this hobby.

Do you collect vintage? Not really, no. Neo-vintage, yes. A Rolex Rootbeer, a Cartier Monopoussoir Tortue CPCP, a Tudor 7016, and I nearly forgot I also have a 1680 Red Sub sitting right here. True vintage is thinner ground for me. An old Gallet, an old Breitling, an old Universal Geneve. That's about the extent of it. Although, I am in love with a Breguet 3050 and may pull that trigger soon.

What's your favorite watch box? The Rothwell 24. Runs somewhere around $160, comes with genuinely nice soft compartments, and I own six or seven of them in brown. Not the best case money can buy, but for the price, hard to beat.