Before you buy your next wristwatch, here is what you need to know about case size, thickness and comfort
Understanding case diameter, thickness, and proportions before you buy will save you from expensive mistakes. Here's why 38mm is the new sweet spot and what measurements actually matter
Wristwatch enthusiasts often obsess over things that seem totally arcane, things that have nothing to do with what the rest of the world is going through. What’s ironic, though, is that often these same niche obsessions translate into mainstream tastes and ultimately affect the trajectory of the watch industry. It’s just that this entire process takes a few years, by when the enthusiasts are nitpicking something else altogether.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the debate over watch sizes. I’ve written about this at length before, so I’ll give the highlights here. Since the 1940s or so—basically the time when wearing wristwatches really caught on—till the 1990s, the size of watch cases had largely been demure. Men’s watches, especially dress watches, were between 32-34mm in width, with sportier models going up to 36mm and 37mm. In fact, 38mm watches used to be termed “jumbo cases".
The only exception to this rule were tool watches like divers or chronographs. Thus, a Rolex Submariner could measure 40mm across, or an Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch Professional could be 41mm. You needed wider, more robust, water-resistant cases to accommodate more legible dials for people working in harsh, dimly lit environments.
SHRINKING THE BEAST
All this changed in the late 90s, when a fetish for large watches took hold, starting with the more expensive end of the market. Ideas of subtlety went out of the window, and bigger was considered better. If you weren’t wearing a mini dinner plate on your wrist, at least 43mm across, what were you even doing? Let’s call it the toxic masculinity craze in wristwatches. The hilarious thing was these were considered respectable sizes even for watches you’d wear with formal wear.
This remained the—excuse the pun—case for the best part of the next 20 years. However, watch enthusiasts were never really comfortable with this. The reason? Well, you could always compare a modern watch to its vintage predecessor, and realise that old designs were way better, more proportional, attractive to look at and comfortable to wear. This came to a head when internet watch fandom exploded during the pandemic. Without much to do in lockdown but go online and look at watch photos on Instagram and buy watches, the aficionado demand for more human-sized watches grew to a crescendo that the market and watchmakers could no longer ignore. Brands like IWC and Panerai—but not just them exclusively—first started offering smaller versions of their standard models, like the pilot’s watches and the Luminor, and then started sloping down the case sizes across the board.
By around 2023, the big watch craze had come to an end. Nowadays, the sweet spot is considered to be at about 38mm for men. What’s more impressive is that much of the gendered narrative surrounding what’s considered a men’s watch and a ladies watch has also changed. For starters, bigger watches look way better on women, because they’re usually not trying to prove anything by wearing them.
Moreover, we now live in a world of unisex sizes, and people are free to choose exactly what looks good on their wrists. After all, we don’t actually need wristwatches to tell the time anymore. We wear them because they are wonderful little mechanical pieces of jewellery.
SLIM IS IN
So now that watch case sizes have returned to sanity, the new buzz is for slimmer watches. You know, the kind that slips easily under the cuff of a shirt? This is another watch enthusiast hobby horse that is becoming mainstream. This completes the unfinished business of making watches elegant again.
There are quite a few brands—I can think of Seiko—where smaller cases are also often quite tall, making the watch wear top-heavy. I sold my Seiko Alpinist a couple of years ago for precisely this reason. I loved it to bits, and it was a gorgeous and tough timepiece, but somehow the case diameter of 38mm just did not sit well with a thickness of 12.9mm. It just felt tubby and unbalanced. A field watch like that has no business being thicker than 12mm, in my opinion.
One of the problems of slimming down the thickness of automatic watches is often the dimensions of the movement. Modern automatic calibers like the Alpinist’s in-house 6R35 are built to be durable, and given the large scale of production, it would cost a lot more for a manufacture like Seiko to keep the movement slim despite an automatic rotor. And that would ultimately reflect in the prices, and nobody wants that.
However, this isn’t necessarily a problem at the higher end of the price spectrum, as brands either build slim in-house movements—such as those at Nomos—or use slimmer mass-market calibers like ETA or modify them—like at Junghans or Longines.
But that’s just for dress watches. A dive watch isn’t expected to slip under the cuff, but that doesn’t mean a tool watch like it has to be excessively thick either. I love to wear my Seiko ‘Slim Turtle’ diver, despite its sizeable 41mm diameter, because its width is balanced by a relatively short lug-to-lug distance of about 47mm, and the fact that it has a very slim and elegant mid-case, reducing the overall height to just 12.3mm, which is quite respectable for a diver.
Ultimately, watches are meant to be worn, and therefore you need to be mindful of how a watch wears. Always remember, the more compact it is, the better.
Handwound is a monthly column on watches and watchmaking.
topics
