For the September subject of GQ, I wrote concerning the raging debate within the watch world between teeny-tiny watches and their outsized counterparts. The tug-of-war has decidedly gone towards teensy items over the previous few years, though a loud contingent refuses to cage their epic 45-mm wristwear. However these beasts took one other vital hit this weekend on the Annual Academy Museum Gala the place Paul Mescal and Dwyane Wade confirmed up with some revealing weaponry of alternative. Wade wore the Tiffany & Co. Eternity watch, a 28-mm girls watch smaller than a half-dollar coin, and October’s GQ cowl star Mescal selected the diminutive watch of 2024, the bite-sized model of the Cartier Tank.
Whereas watches have been trending smaller, with some adventurous dressers like Timothée Chamalet and Unhealthy Bunny sporting girls’ watches, it’s now absolutely breaking into the mainstream. Let’s clarify this in Pokémon phrases, as a result of that’s what we’re all conversant in, proper? You gave your development a Paul Mescal Stone. What? Your development is evolving! Congratulations, it’s now the mainstream aesthetic!
Mescal’s tiny Tank was one in every of the dialog items at this yr’s Watches & Wonders, the business’s greatest tradeshow. The shrunken Tank replicates its bigger counterpart in each means—offering the entire iconic Cartier particulars in smaller packaging. A lot smaller: the TTT (teeny-tiny Tank) measures in at an lovable 24 by 16.5 mm.
The TTT was Cartier’s follow-up to 2023’s smash-hit Bagnoire Bangle, a product the Parisian jeweler nonetheless can’t preserve in inventory. I deliver the Bangle up as a result of it demonstrates how shortly tendencies can transfer. Whereas many male collectors acknowledged the great thing about the Bangle upon its launch, few dared to really put on it. Even those that did, just like the tremendous fashionable Mark Cho, wore it as a bracelet and hid it below go well with sleeves. Now, only a yr later, celebrities are proudly sporting equally small watches on the crimson carpet.
And it’s not simply Mescal driving the delightfully small ripples of the tiny watch development. Wade confirmed as much as the identical occasion with an equally pint-sized piece. Wade takes his wristwear critically—a lot in order that his stylist Jason Bolden advised me he hems his consumer’s go well with sleeves a contact shorter to set the stage for his watches. That makes Wade’s style assertion final night time ring that a lot louder.