Size Matters!!

Bigger is Better! Size Matters!

We hear it all the time, don't we? The girls on Sex and the City talked about it and now, I am!! I'm just going to go in a different direction with it.

Take a trip through your local watch store. Be it a Tourneau, Wempe, or your local Saks and check out the size of watches lately. At one time Rolex was thought to demand a pretty large parcel of wrist real estate. Now, the venerable brand is miniscule compared to whats in the marketplace.

Take Panerai for instance. The uniquely militant Italian brand that is taking the luxury watch world by storm. Sure they have a few 40mm options (avg. size Rolex is 38mm) for the ladies in your life - but the majority of the collection is a stout and proud 44mm wide, and that is not including the oversized crown guard.

Breitling is another. You can see in the picture above that my Breitling Super Ocean Steelfish takes up my entire wrist from top to bottom. The watch is actually so heavy, that I had to use a Breitling sport rubber strap in place of the standard metal bracelet to shave off some oz's. Thats 43mm of steel from left to right.

There are several out there that push the envelope of size. Bell & Ross has a 42 and 46mm instrument that wears even larger because of its square shape. IWC lives and plays in the 42mm arena. But the biggest and baddest of them all. The John Holmes of luxury timepieces would have to be the U-Boat Flightdeck. 55mm of pure Italian badass. Stallone and Arnold have been seen rockin' these around town. They even look too large for them. Just to give you an idea of how large 55mm really is...the average computer mouse is 54mm wide. Yeah, I know...huge, right?

So the next time you are out and about and you overhear some ladies at the bar talking about "wider is better", they just might be talking about what's on your wrist.