Tracey Llewellyn

There are now so many watch events in New York that owning a timepiece has become almost incidental. On Monday there might be 100 or so people at Bucherer TimeMachine. Then Tuesday could bring something smaller at Material Good or The Armoury, followed by a brand dinner, a Phillips auction preview, or a watchmaker arriving from Switzerland armed with six watches and no intention of returning with any of them. The faces become familiar but each time, the crowd grows. It would be easy to dismiss this as New York mistaking itself for the entire United States. Yet it is better understood as a test bed for something happening across the country. Windup Watch Fair now travels to Dallas, San Francisco, and Chicago before returning to Manhattan.

The FIFA World Cup is coming to the United States (Thursday, June 11 to Sunday, July 19, 2026), which means, for a few weeks, the country will submit to calling the Beautiful Game football. It already does so more often than it admits, and the insistence on “soccer” now feels faintly performative. The US came late to the game, but Major League Soccer now draws average crowds of more than 22,000 a match, placing it alongside established European leagues. Its broadcast deal with Apple – 10 years and $2.5 billion – suggests confidence. The arrival of Lionel Messi at Inter Miami CF in 2023 did not create interest so much as accelerate it. Watchmaking, as it tends to, has followed the audience.

There is something faintly absurd about a modern sailor checking the tide on a mechanical wristwatch before leaving the dock. It’s a defiant act of Luddism. Whether it is TAG Heuer’s new Seafarer – a revival of a sun-bleached Abercrombie & Fitch regatta chronograph – or IWC’s technical Portugieser Yacht Club Moon & Tide, the implication is that the information cannot be found on the GPS already blinking somewhere on the boat. The comedy sharpens when you remember that sailing, at the top end, has long since escaped the romance of canvas and teak. Today’s elite yachts are machines for people who find the wind a nuisance best managed by an algorithm. Foils hum with the clinical efficiency of a private equity firm’s server room.