The Coolest Flex Right Now Is a Cheap Watch

This is an edition of the newsletter Box + Papers, Cam Wolf’s weekly deep dive into the world of watches. Sign up here.

It’s Hot Take Month here on Box + Papers, with a new guest writer dropping by each Friday to deliver their spiciest watch opinion. Today, I’m thrilled to welcome Brynn Wallner, who you might know better as the game-changing Instagram account Dimepiece. The high priestess of the Watch Illuminati, the TTRO evangelist, the JFK Jr. revivalist, and one of the coolest people in the industry. —Cam Wolf

New York City-based entertainer Kareem Rahma—or as you may know him, the guy from Subway Takes—recently found himself at 4 Charles Prime Rib, an impossible-to-get-into West Village restaurant, seated with a group of fancy guys wearing their fancy timepieces.

“Everyone had some baller shit on. Like, $50,000 watches,” he recalls. “But I was wearing a G-Shock. And I felt really cool.”

Rahma was expressing a thought that’s been lingering in my head ever since I got into watches: The coolest flex is an anti-flex. It’s Jack Nicholson sitting courtside watching the Lakers battle it out in the playoffs wearing a $50 Timex. In the celebrity-row sea of the Staples Center (as Jack probably still calls it), swimming with Royal Oaks and Daytonas, the chicest fish is the Timex.

“To wear an inexpensive watch… It’s almost ‘quiet luxury’,” Rahma says, referencing the Loro Piana-ified aesthetic that briefly had us all in a chokehold. Or maybe it’s a little like the preppy tendency to choose the “reliable bumper sticker-covered Volvo station wagon in a parking lot full of Teslas,” as Samuel Hine wrote when he investigated the prevalence of prep at New York Fashion Week this fall. In their most idealized form, watches are designed not only to transcend whatever’s hot on the runway or your TikTok feed, but to transcend the centuries. “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.” But. If you literally never get to own a Patek Philippe, you might just wear a cheap watch, and, in a way, that’s just as good—it’s the Volvo (or maybe the similarly reliable and understated Honda Accord) instead of the Rolls Royce.

Covering luxury watches for a living, I know I’m not supposed to say this. And yes, I do worship at the altar of craftsmanship and heritages that define my favorite big brands. Indeed, the last thing I normally do before leaving my apartment is put on a Rolex. But having gotten to the point that a presentation for a 5 or 6-figure watch (as in, the $328K Audemars Piguet RD#5 Royal Oak I saw yesterday) no longer phases me, it’s fun to be surprised by a Casio.