Big watches are so back, baby. After a stretch of well-behaved jewelry watches everywhere, my appetite is swinging right back toward watches with some weight—literal and visual. It’s the same instinct that Kylie Jenner had in 2016.
By now we’ve learned that subtlety is a virtue, especially as it comes to dressing ourselves, so this time around, the oversize watch is more about a kind of blunt honesty in proportion. Think of it as punctuating your daily uniform with tension in a way that isn’t begging for attention, bringing a line of structure to an area you’d usually ignore. Not for nostalgia nor irony, the oversize watch is about wardrobing, changing the conversation around an outfit in a small but definite way. Here are the key watches to note.
AUDEMARS PIGUET ROYAL OAK
Dua Lipa, famously loyal to her yellow gold Cartier Panthère, recently tucked a yellow-gold Royal Oak with a natural turquoise dial into an Instagram post. Audemars Piguet released this watch back in 2023, and it’s impossibly beautiful and difficult to find, in equal measure.
I personally have a reverence for the Royal Oak, and its history is one of my favorite watch stories—a master class in the psychology of luxury and taking fashion risks, played out over time. Today, we know of the Royal Oak as one of the most recognizable watch silhouettes, but when it debuted in 1972, it was just as risky as it was shocking. A watch in stainless steel priced higher than most gold counterparts was harshly confrontational to the idea of luxury and what luxury could be. Considering the architectural severity of the design, which was well outside the mainstream style codes that favored smaller, round, gold, dressy watches, the watch was nowhere near an instant commercial success.
Audemars Piguet might be a Swiss brand, but the interest in the Royal Oak started in Milan—in my opinion, the most stylish city—where clients already cared about furniture, architecture, and strong lines. They understood what AP was trying to do, and that early Italian demand is what pushed the Royal Oak forward.
ROLEX GMT
In the early 1950s, intercontinental flights started to become part of regular commercial travel, and crews were moving through several time zones in a single shift. Enter Pan American World Airways. Pan Am reached out to Rolex with a request for a watch capable of showing both their base time zone and the local time where they landed, and in 1954, Rolex introduced the first GMT-Master, reference 6542, built with a 24-hour hand and a rotating bezel to keep both time zones visible.
There’s something about the bones of a tool watch that I can never get enough of. I think it’s the suggestion of having a purpose, even if its function is completely irrelevant now. That leftover trace of utility is what adds both substance and structure to any outfit that might otherwise feel too styled.
Seventy years later, the modern GMT-Master II feels just as grounded as its original, with the original architecture nearly intact: a rotating bezel, a fourth hand, and graphic two-tone ceramics.
OMEGA SPEEDMASTER
Great style can come from a full life, sure, but I think the best style is the kind that’s internally aligned. You can feel when someone’s sartorial choices are anchored in who they are, not in what they’re trying to project. The appeal here is honesty: value coming from within without the need to justify.
Cue the Speedmaster. Omega released it in 1957 as a straightforward chronograph—a mechanical timing watch designed to be operated easily and read quickly. However, with everything Omega does, there is an undercurrent of integrity to the quality. A kind of craftsmanship that speaks for itself without ever being too flashy.
So when NASA, in the 1960s, bought a handful of off-the-shelf chronographs and pushed them through extreme heat, cold, shock, vibration, pressure, and vacuum tests, the Speedmaster was the only one that passed from start to finish. On that basis, NASA selected the watch for its Gemini and Apollo crews—and the rest is history!
CHANEL J12
Greatness comes from having a point of view and mastery is the result of focus. Jacques Helleu, Chanel’s artistic director then, set out in the early 1990s to create a watch built around a single visual idea: deep color, high polish, and smooth continuity. And ceramic was the only material that could support that framework, and in 2000, the Chanel J12 was born.
What I’ve always appreciated about the J12 is how direct and graphic it is. Visually, there’s a pop-art simplicity to the J12 in the way its lines are not only distilled to pure form but emphasized through commitment to a single color. The watch is entirely defined by its material, treating it with the seriousness usually reserved for metal.
This year, Chanel released a matte, deep-blue ceramic version—the J12 Bleu—reinforcing the idea that the watch evolves through discovery and refinement of material rather than design overhauls, which is why each new color feels like a meaningful extension.
