„Ultimate Collector Watches“ brings together objects that measure time and shows how strongly time today is understood as something to be preserved. Not as experience, but as form. What matters, therefore, is less the significance of individual watches than the image of time that emerges from their staging.
The Logic of Collecting
The two-volume publication „Ultimate Collector Watches“ by Charlotte and Peter Fiell brings together 100 wristwatches dating from 1892 to the present day. The chronologically structured selection is accompanied by essays, conversations with collectors and market participants, as well as large-format detail photographs. Rather than presenting a comprehensive history of watchmaking, the project focuses on exemplary pieces and their position within a highly specialised collecting milieu. The emphasis lies on selection, comparison and contextualisation, rather than on questions of use, everyday life or social dissemination.
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Time as an Elevated Object
Across the volumes unfolds a narrative in which mechanical watches appear as carriers of memory, artisanal care and cultural continuity. The present, by contrast, is mostly depicted implicitly as accelerated, functional and fleeting. Terms such as craftsmanship, ritual, passion and duration structure the tone and perspective, lending collecting a cultural charge that extends beyond mere ownership. Collecting thus appears as a form of concentration, an attempt to focus attention and stabilise time. Meaning arises less through use than through selection, care and preservation.
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The Aesthetics of Preservation
The perspective remains consistently aesthetic. Market mechanisms, social accessibility or economic preconditions are not problematised, but recede behind the presentation of the objects. Although auctions, provenances and prices are present, they are embedded in a calm, almost timeless narrative style. Nostalgia functions here less as retrospection than as an organising principle: mechanics stand for reliability, handcraft for permanence. The past is not used as a subject of debate, but serves as a frame of reference that offers orientation.
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A Contemporary Image of Time
„Ultimate Collector Watches“ addresses readers who understand duration, precision and material reliability as cultural values. The book does not pass an explicit judgement on time, but instead sketches a quiet ideal: time should be controllable and manifest itself in objects. In a present shaped by acceleration, preservation appears not as retreat, but as an attitude. The watches stand less for use or everyday life than for a form of cultural self-affirmation. What becomes visible is a conception of time that derives its meaning less from change than from constancy.
Reading Recommendation
Ultimate Collector Watches. TASCHEN, 2025, 960 pages, EUR 250.