hey everyone this is gq recommends and today we’re going to be talking about everything you need to know to buy your first watch today we are going to be splitting watches up into two big categories which really divide the purposes of these watches so we’re going to start with dress watches and then move into sport watches which has a much larger field of sub-categories because these things are so purpose-built for the job that they’re supposed to be doing i think at the end of the day if you’re buying your first watch the only thing to care about and correct me if i’m wrong is like you just have to be really into the watcher by you have to love it you’re gonna ideally wear this a lot you know no one needs to wear a watch you have a phone in your pocket that can do it perfectly well so if you’re gonna buy a watch you want something that you you want to put on every day i think getting something that you are happy to to see every day is so critical especially if you’re buying your first watch a good watch is never going to go out of style so when you’re talking about dress watches you’re talking about a very traditional idea of a watch right this is going to be something that is on a leather strap typically it’s going to be a finer fancier metal you’re going to see a lot of gold when you talk about sports watches there’s so much like the history and the provenance and the stories behind these watches you’re going to see that a lot less in dress watches you know that steve mcqueen wears a certain cartier tank but it’s not going to have that same sense of like historic achievement that you know a rolex oyster perpetual was like the first watch that accompanied the first track up everest like a dress watch isn’t going to have that kind of like mythical story behind it its whole job is to just look really nice dress watches like any other watch category will come in a lot of different price points so if you only want to spend you know a couple hundred dollars the timex marlin is like a really cool watch but then you know you eventually start bumping up to the watches with like really fine craftsmanship no offense to the timex marlin of course the first watch i really like is this launching flagship heritage the richardson guy rojay jean-page just wore this watch it looks great the black dial i really like a black dial for a dress watch because like you’re out at night you’re wearing it with probably like a black tuxedo or like a midnight blue tuxedo so you want to have sort of no regular suits just tuxedos just tuxedos maybe a suit you know if you are really dressing down for your your gala if you’re talking dress watches you kind of can’t not talk about the cartier tank like every kind of awesome celebrity you can think of right has has worn a cartier tank type every like archetype of a celebrity that you would want to have muhammad ali huge tank guy and then you move to like british royalty princess diana was very devoted to wearing her tank founder of cartier was apparently just having his morning coffee and he was looking at his paper and there were these overhead shots of these tanks like in world war one storming this city and he liked the overhead view that’s sort of the story behind how it got its like rectangular boxy shape and it became so popular that people just started replicating it’s just called like a tank style watch and this is a watch that you know tiffany and co had made by movado in the 40s because cartier was like so influential in defining the shape as one of the preeminent designs if you were gonna have a dress watch it’s just a timeless classic watch now we’re gonna talk about expensive watches which are really defining in this category the one that i really love is this vacheron it’s so defining of a dress watch it’s a plain dial made out of gold that’s a watch you know and it’s not until you get real close to it and get a good look at it that you have a sense of just how fancy it is it’s like a discreet kind of kind of language right like it’s it’s that’s true luxury man it doesn’t have any complication it’s just completely a time only watch which i think is so traditional like most of the cartier tanks are going to be time only as well because you don’t need the chronographs or the busy dials or the annual calendar even the date it’s just meant to look beautiful [Music] dive watches as the name tells you are meant for diving and they’ve come up with like a bunch of different rules that guide what is and what isn’t a dive watch it you know it has to handle salt water it has to be able to dive at least 100 meters has to be shock resistant you know it comes with all of these different parameters that just to be a dive watch you have to meet they’re made out of steel they’ve got a steel bracelet or maybe a rubber strap like these watches are designed to take a beating so when you’re talking about dive watches if we go like word association i say dive watch you say submariner how’d you know so tell me about the the rolex submariner it is the probably like archetypal defining dive watch we’ll use the rolex little brother as an example like the defining characteristics of a dive watch on a dial are you’re always going to have this triangle at the top the batons at three six and nine and then the rest of them are going to be circles because you know when you’re underwater you just want to glance at something quickly when that started with the with the submariner sports watches are the most popular watches on earth submariner is of those watches you know one of the like two or three or four most popular and unlike some of them has been one of the couple most popular for 20 30 40 years right this was like a james bond watch at one point if we’re talking about an affordable dive watch there’s basically one name you start with and that’s seiko seiko is a japanese brand that makes you know everything from like a 200 watch dress or sport all the way up to you know watches that cost many thousands of dollars which is a seiko prospects dive watches the like family it lives in it’s a nice not too big size which you know with dive watches you tend to see like kind of beefy or bulkier watches this one’s a little more compact got that bezel to track you know how long you’ve been uh underwater or uh you know when the parking meter is going to come up and it’s got those little hits of orange just so you can see what’s going on yeah uh in the dark or you know water at the bottom of the ocean that sort of thing and then if you want to go a little uh fancier in the category this is tudor’s black bay which is like this is a signature watch for tudor and tudor’s a really cool company right just a really really sturdy stainless steel dive watch you know this this is this is like a big like david beckham watch right like yeah if you are looking to get your first watch if you want to invest in if you want to contrast tutor like like you’re not going to find a lot of things in that price range that are better than that what what watch is this this is the omega seamaster ultra g it has earned that name this one just like the standard size can dive to 6 000 meters which is um outrageous but just recently for its 2022 releases omega put out a new version of the ultra jeep based on the watch that traveled to the bottom of the mariana trench in the pacific ocean now omega can say we have the watch that dove further than any watch has and went to the deepest point of the ocean [Music] kim tell me about racing watches racing watches or chronograph watches or the reason it’s called the rolex daytona is because they would give it out as a prize for the winner of the daytona we’re talking legendary drivers legendary cars and they also you know like a dive watch have their own distinctive qualities it’s always going to have a chronograph that’s like essential to this watch you know the bezel most often it’s going to have a tacky meter here why don’t we start with this guy yeah so this is the uh the tag heuer monaco famous racing watch monaco is of course like famous like home for racing and this is famously the watch worn by steve mcqueen uh in in his movie le mans and the story behind this is that he was consulting an actual professional driver and he saw that the guy wore a tag [ __ ] monaco so he requested that the guy handling props and costumes get him a monaco too what else we got we have another striking navy blue watch here when you’re talking about watches the omega speedmaster is one of the most iconic watches because it went through this rigorous testing from nasa it was the only one approved for in-flight travel and worked out well the time for them because they got to be the first watch that went to the moon so when you want to talk about like the top end of the market boy can we ever do that right i think we could call the rolex daytona one of the most popular watches on earth yeah the last couple years you know paul newman wore a specific variation of this watch and when it came up for auction a couple years ago it sold for it set the record at the time for like almost 18 million dollars which like that’s what we talk about when we talk about sport watches it’s not selling because like it’s gold or the complication or anything like that it’s sold like that because it has this amazing history inside of it this is there’s a daytona that’s like the john mayer daytona yeah then the green dial the money green the john mayer and the paul newman what they have in common is that when they were first released people didn’t really like them that much which is part of the reason that the specific paul newman is so desirable because because people didn’t like it as much rolex didn’t make as many of them and now 30 40 years later they’re a lot more difficult to find paul newman also famous for his song your body is a wonderland yeah [Music] all right so now we’re going to talk about pilot watches pilot watch is going to have like big huge numerals they’re also like for the gloves they typically have like really big crowns because like if you have a gloved finger and you’re trying to like we’re talking like like exposed cockpit flying basically right this is like if you’re flying these are these were designed for pilots who like when they were flying were in the elements yes we’re in the elements yeah so a couple of the more popular pilot watches breitling is a brand sort of like famously associated with aviation right yeah they made watches for like different pilots associations you know if you are into a dial like that like super design heavy dial this is like an old-school computer exactly and do calculations on it you have people who are like really dedicated to breitling i think it’s cultivated like such a cool fan base of like jerry seinfeld loves these watches which makes sense because there’s breitling for bentley breitling does a collaboration with a motorcycle brand so you get also like a lot of automotive stuff in here i see where jerry steinfeld kind of like falls into that harrison ford like loves breitling too which that makes a lot of sense he’s like a hobbyist pilot fate yes famously style another really fun brand when it comes to pilot watches is belle ross which actually would like they made all their dials inspired by you know what you would see on the dashboard of a cockpit so like they kind of just lifted that straight from a plane and like made it into a watch it looks like a gauge right yeah exactly right one brand when you’re talking about pilot watches that’s important to bring up is iwc they make this iconic big pilot’s watch it’s like so emblematic of what a pilot’s watch is it has the the big crown on it has the big legible numerals it has another big feature of a pilot’s watch is a the little triangle at at 12 o’clock because if you’re upside down i guess in an airplane and are like trying to orient yourself on your wrist like you always know that like that’s the top of the watch where that triangle is the sign of a great pilot’s watch is that like you know denzel washington and flight flipping the plane upside down would be able to to read it right yeah exactly [Music] the last big category that we want to talk about when it comes to sport watches is field watch is super super purpose-built like the explorer ii which is made specifically for spelunking so the whole thing is like designed with a luminous hand so that like when you’re deep in a cave like really specific tools so that if you’re diving a cave you have like a watch to go with it you know military issue watches too right like tend to be field watches you know sort of like khaki green nylon strap really tough hard wearing like one of the more popular brands marathon it’s a really inexpensive watch and they did a recent collaboration with j.crew but like people didn’t know about it because to this day like 90 of its business just comes from government contracts this is what the military wears they wear a marathon watch because it’s hard wearing and durable and it’s not fussy because you just kind of want to know the time set it and forget it yeah hamilton famous american brand right you know super sturdy reasonably priced you’re going to get a mechanical watch that’s going to be super solid um you know great investment if you’re looking for a first watch a white t-shirt and jeans kind of watch you know also in the mid-range category again another one of those great french names i love pronouncing mall brawl this geosphere watch that has the two subdials are actually dedicated to showing the northern and summer southern hemisphere and if you see this thing in action those little pictures are actually like rotating to try and i believe what it does is tell you about the time zones and so you can keep track of you know what the time is in every single one of the time zones incredibly cool and and and obviously the the bezel instead of having numbers has the the four you know uh cardinal directions right so you if you i think you probably need a compass on you but you can adjust to like point it in roughly that direction you can just follow your right that’s something that you would want for a field watch if you’re just like out in you know no man’s land you get a lot of stuff on on the bezel right like you look at the explorer too right which is rolex’s cave diving watch and that’s got the 24-hour bezel and so it’s got a gmt hand like the other gmt watch and you can use that for another time zone or you can use it if you’re going to be underground for more than 24 hours to figure out how long you know if you’ve been there for inside 12 hours or over 12 hours because you can only go around once yeah if you’re in a cave you don’t want to be like is it am or pm famously rolex explorer to wear prince harry and but i mean you see like just really fashionable people are attracted to the rolex explorer too it’s such a funny thing that like a watch made for spelunking also is like megan rapino and like valenciaga wants to wear a rolex explorer ii with that outfit i think it’s like such a handsome watch [Music] every watch we’ve seen here you could have worn 50 years ago probably and you could wear 50 years in the future i think that’s another just beautiful thing about watches is that it’s an investment you’re buying it to wear it for for a long long time and either to to pass that thing down or to trade it in for the the next one that you love so that’s how to buy your first watch thank you guys for for watching [Music]
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