Episode 74: Too Thick Or Not Too Thick…

By David Vaucher

Too Thick, or Not Too Thick?

That is indeed the question in today’s watch community.

It seems to me that as soon as a new release is announced, it doesn’t take much time for someone to comment:

“If this were a bit thinner, it would be an insta-buy”.

That is assuming someone doesn’t beat them to it with the more direct assessment of “lol nope, too thick”.

It wasn’t always this way.

When I first got really deep into watches in 2010, the industry was coming out of a “super cycle” in terms of both pricing and watch proportions; back then, 47 mm Panerais and Hublot King Powers reigned, and it was a mark of pride to have a watch the size of a grapefruit on your wrist.

As it always does, the pendulum swung the other way; the style world moved from the trashy trucker hats of the 2000s to the tailored suits of the Tumblr era, and horological tastes shifted towards smaller and smaller watches.

During that transitional period, the width measurement was usually looked at first. Now, however, with smaller watches clearly preferred - at least in the enthusiast community - it seems that potential buyers are comfortable assuming that a watch will be within a certain, quite narrow, band, so instead they go straight to a measurement that doesn’t yet seem to have converged: the watch’s thickness.

In a previous Audicle about Hublot, I wrote about “zombie” opinions, views that just stumble along despite being relatively easy to refute, and I think one of the most “undead” opinions out there is that a watch can categorically be “too thick”.

Let’s first focus on the term “thickness”, which has taken on negative connotations with regards to watches, but which the Oxford dictionary simply defines as “the size of something between opposite surfaces or sides”.

If I were to say that a watch “has thickness”, what I’m really saying is just that it has a non-zero measurement beyond height and width.

The word “thick” is, by contrast, subjective. Turning again to Oxford’s, the definition of “thick” is “having a larger distance between opposite sides or surfaces than other similar objects or than normal”.

With that definition in mind, can a watch be “thick”, or even “too thick”, unless it’s in relation to some specific situation?

What, in that definition, constitutes “normal”?

In this context I like to bring up the example of the door to a bank vault.

Does this door have “thickness”?

Yes, in the sense that it is not a flat surface.

Now, is it “thick”, or even “too thick”?

Well, that depends what it’s being used for.

If I wanted to repurpose this hypothetical bank vault door for my home, it may indeed be too thick for a lot of things: looking proportional in the space, not impeding the other doors, or perhaps just weighing too much for the floor.

Is it however “too thick” in an absolute sense?

That depends on the design intent and use cases.

Consider this: if it was designed to resist a pry-bar but would-be robbers come in with dynamite, this “thick” bank vault door may in fact not be thick enough!

Back to watches now, can you really look at a watch’s thickness measurement alone and proclaim it’s “too thick”?

Of course not!

If you frequently wear fitted shirts and jackets, I can understand that a large dive chronograph might not be at the top of your list, but do you always wear fitted shirts and jackets?

Personally I’m pretty dressed down on weekends, and a dive chronograph doesn’t sound “too thick” at all for a Sunday BBQ. It’s overkill, maybe, but not too thick.

I had firsthand experience with this last year when I traveled to attend my first post-COVID conference. For peace-of-mind I don’t usually like to travel with more than the watch I leave the house with, and for this conference I thought my Seiko King Turtle would make an ideal choice: it’s robust, it looked cool on a NATO strap I’d just acquired, and considering its size it had always looked well-proportioned in all previous wearing occasions.

Long-story-short, I made a mistake and quickly discovered it was a huge pain in the ass trying to hide this watch under my suit and overall it looked and felt really awkward. At that particular time, the Seiko Turtle was indeed “too thick” for what I was doing, any other time though, it’s a great piece.

The opposite happened a few years ago when I bought myself an Omega Planet Ocean 600 M dive chronograph. Omega lists this watch’s thickness as 19.3 mm; I’m sure several of you out there are probably retching right now, but I never did and still don’t pay that measurement any attention.

The watch has a see-through caseback, 600 m of water resistance, a co-axial escapement and a chronograph. All of that functionality comes with extra millimeters, but all that functionality is exactly what caused my primitive lizard brain to shoot off fireworks when I purchased it.

I wear this watch in the Summer, during which time I’m never in long sleeves and the orange accents go perfectly with whatever I have on, so while this Omega has ample thickness, it is, for me, not “too thick”.

Going back to that thickness/functionality tradeoff, I think that if one reflexively dismisses a watch as “too thick” they are at best not considering the full design intent of the watch, at worst putting down the hard work of designers and engineers for whom any given thickness was, in fact, a very deliberate choice.

Play a game of word association with a watch geek about the original Tudor Black Bay 41 and the recently released Black Bay Pro, and “thick” is probably the first word that comes out.

How fair is that?

A Rolex Explorer II has 100 m of water resistance, whereas the Black Bay Pro has 200 m of water resistance, and that doubling of the rating probably contributed to the latter’s case thickness. If you proclaim the Black Bay Pro to be “too thick”, you’re really saying that you don’t need 200 m of water resistance.

Maybe you don’t, but someone else (me included!) could think differently. Plus, if you say that, can’t you pull on that thread and convince yourself that wearing a mechanical watch, or any watch really, is unnecessary?

That wouldn’t be much fun at all, and watches are meant to be fun, occasionally even overbuilt and over-the-top (which is part of the fun!).

In the case of the original Black Bay 41, maybe Rolex just didn’t want anything that competed too directly with the Submariner at the time and you know what?

If that was the reasoning, then the Black Bay 41 was not “too thick”, but rather, exactly as intended. If you did find that watch “too thick”, it was “too thick” for you, but I hope you didn’t reach this conclusion until after you’d tried one on at an AD.

Over the last few years, I’ve had more fun in watches than I ever have because I’ve made a sincere effort not to dismiss watches outright, for any reason.

At the risk of sounding like some stoned freshman in a college dorm at midnight, a watch is not “too thick”, “too thin”, “too heavy” or “too anything”.

A watch just “is”, and if a watch doesn’t suit you, well, it doesn’t suit you, and that’s it, everyone else should feel free to make their own independent choice as well.

While I don’t personally wish to return to a time when watch companies only released 50 mm grapefruits, I don’t want to be heading into a time when watch companies are only releasing 38 mm grapes either.

Give me the whole fruit salad, and let’s all be grateful to have so much color, freshness and taste in front of us.