How 2020 Changed The Way We Wear Watches

The end of 2020 is nearly here and, once again, the aBlogtoWatch team is contemplating what watches stood out the most to them across the last year. As I have much more to say on the topic than we can fit in our forthcoming team article, this post is a summary of what I wore and what I learned as a watch enthusiast in 2020. The inglorious year of 2020 didn’t go as anticipated. What an impact that has made on the watches we’ve worn the most during 2020 — during the bulk (we hope) of the COVID-19 pandemic.

What most watch lovers will probably agree was missing for them this year was social opportunities to show off their watches. No, flashing your wrist to your webcam for an on-screen hero shot simply isn’t the same as dangling your wrist toy in person among a group of similarly watch-addicted folks. A lack of social opportunity has made wearing status-symbol and “look-at-me” watches nearly irrelevant for many enthusiasts. This has prompted an enormous return to “watches for me;” timepiece enthusiasts are able, once again, to “wear for themselves.” For many people, the ability to simply wear what made them happy (no matter the price or prestige) has been quite soothing. Likewise, Internet conversations about watches have skyrocketed. So, at least much of the social dimension of being a watch collector was indeed preserved (if not strengthened) during the pandemic.

I will admit that, in April 2020, I was deeply concerned there wouldn’t be enough watch-wearing opportunities for me during the pandemic — and it turns out that I didn’t have much to worry about. A slew of new watches came across my desk this year, and it has been challenging to keep up, even taking into account that the major corporate-owned watch brands released far fewer products in 2020 than would have been without COVID-19.

This year has been a very physically active one, for me. I spent the first part of the year dedicating many hours to hiking the hills around Los Angeles, day and night. As such, I found myself wearing smartwatches as activity trackers quite a bit. I cycled through a number of products such as the Apple Watch, Garmin MARQ, and Casio G-Shock Move, among others. Smartwatches behave very differently when tracking workouts, even though I found most of them are rather consistent when it comes to the metrics they track (distance traveled or heart-rate measurements are similar across different devices). I learned this because, more than once, I would wear a different smartwatch on each wrist to see how they each performed. I was actually impressed at how similar many were. What irks me the most is still having to manually start a workout instance, as well as recall when to turn it off. While this is simple in theory, I routinely found myself starting my workout after starting 10 minutes prior, and sometimes not recalling to “end” the workout until driving home.

Only the Apple Watch tried to remedy this by once in a while suggesting that my work out might be over. That said, each time I saw this reminder I was not only still exercising but also experiencing a high heart-rate while still moving. That meant I felt insulted that mere software was considering my clearly active state as being not active enough! Anyhow, I got over it and still like tracking my workouts. I don’t do anything with the information afterward, but I find it very interesting (and often satisfying) to put some numerical measurements on the effort I just put in. I very much feel that the exercise training/tracking features of smartwatches make them appealing to a large number of consumers — even if the devices aren’t worn all the time.

My physical efforts changed over the second part of 2020 to something less exciting and more mundane: housework. I got myself caught up in house renovation work as well as moving a lot of personal items and furniture. Working with tools and lifting boxes for months gave me new skills and stamina. Absent the travel and fine dining of the luxury industry due to the pandemic, and with caulking on my hands and pliers in my pocket, I had to wear appropriate watches. What did those end up being? A lot of tritium and G-Shocks, apparently. I’d say that military-style tool watches and Casio G-Shocks were what I preferred — and the latter was exclusively reserved for when my hands were going in scratchy and scuffy small spaces.

I’ve never had to be more of a practical watch-wearer than in 2020. Indeed, I wore my share of solid-gold watches and wild artistic timepieces — but outside of a jaunt to the supermarket, I had nowhere to experience how other people would react to these products or how they might fit in a space. I simply had to make educated guesses from experience. I certainly don’t want to review watches without such real-world experiences forever. But I did become quite adept at evaluating a tool watch. While in social contexts I really like a big and bold watch, when I am working with my hands or exercising, I actually don’t. It isn’t that I preferred smaller watches in these situations so much as that I found disincentives to wear watches that were bigger than they needed to be. I am pretty sure that most watch lovers feel the same way. When socializing, your wrist is relatively safe and you can afford to wear a larger artistic palette. Alternatively, when you are being active, you want your watch to be as out of the way and sensible as possible. Sure it still needs to look cool and make you smile while performing useful functions, but it can’t hamper your purpose.

Marathon, Ball, Luminox, and other watches with tritium gas tubes (as well as some Seiko watches due to their excellent traditional lume) found a lot of time on my wrist in 2020 given that I could read them in the dark while outside. I had the most Marathon watches on hand, so I wore those the most — and always liked the strict adherence to functionality and legibility (which I found reassuring when alone on a hiking trail at 2am). I also wore a fair mix of metal bracelets, rubber bands, and probably more NATO-style straps than I had worn in the past.

What 2020 allowed me to do is rediscover my tool-watch appreciation by giving me a lot of opportunities to wear them (and few opportunities to wear much else). I grew up admiring 1980s military action heroes (like Rambo) and their watches. Soldiering on in 2020, I finally felt like I was living the character so many of my timepieces were meant for.