Calling time on gendered watches

What is a woman? Are sex and gender different? How do we reconcile ourselves to the use of certain pronouns that still feel grammatically fraught? These are big questions with wide-ranging implications for everything from kids’ access to puberty blockers to the validity of single-sex sports teams. But the increasingly fluid concept of gender is also impacting the watch world in fascinating ways.

Traditionally, women (apologies if you find that term old-fashioned) got a raw deal from this male-dominated industry. Many brands took the “shrink it, pink it” approach to female watch design, lazily modifying existing men’s models with smaller cases, feminine colours and the addition of the odd diamond here and there. Lack of effort and imagination weren’t the only issues: often these watches were technically inferior products that ditched mechanical movements in favour of quartz batteries – presumably due to the eye-rolling assumption that women shouldn’t worry their pretty heads about such complicated things. As a result, many women simply appropriated men’s watches.

Today, even the most stolid cisgender male has been forced to recognise that times have changed. Brands are starting to realise that merely categorising a watch as “men’s” or “women’s” can be seen as reductive, outdated and, worst of all, not very cool. Last year, for example, Zenith removed all gender-based search functions from its website, preferring to classify its watches by size.

More interesting from a gender-parity perspective is that men are increasingly gravitating towards watches that would have long been defined as feminine. Take US rapper Tyler the Creator, who has become renowned for his vintage Cartier pieces that he sports on pastel leather straps, while singer The Weeknd turned up at this year’s Cannes Film Festival with a diamond-studded ladies’ Piaget on his wrist.

Such examples may still be fairly outré but, in the mainstream, too, men are opting for less conspicuously macho timepieces. The prevailing trend for a while has been for smaller cases, as exemplified by the Tudor Black Bay 54, a classic dive watch that was downsized this year to a 36-millimetre diameter. Pink, meanwhile, has become the dial colour of the year, with a host of brands from TAG Heuer to Chopard jumping on board. More than ever before, watches are breaking free of the age-old gender binary – and the best thing about this shift is it feels about as radical as a woman in pants.

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