How to Not Make a Mediocre Watch

Lisbon’s weather in late May shared the same trait as a ten year old figuring out whether or not to become an astronaut or a race car driver: enthusiastically indecisive about what they wanted to be.

I arrived on the island on a Tuesday in 2022. My wife, the experienced and well traveled European, patiently explained that Tuesdays were prime times for booking and traveling. “Who the hell goes on a vacation on a Tuesday?” I’d muttered. We had spent up until the night before arguing on the merits of me going. The forecast called for overcast days mixed with the steady drizzle that even a Londoner or native Seatallite would be hard pressed not to call “damp”. She, still patiently but with noticeable restraint, told me that I had already spent the money but above all else, it would be one of those memories I would look back on and be completely disappointed with myself had I not gone. I am an introvert who takes any minor inconvenience as a sign from the universe to stay indoors, make a cuppa, and read a book so I was leaning heavily into shrugging and cutting my losses. But this time I listened and I caught my flight, soaring into a very dark and ominous looking sky.

The good people at Nomos had loaned me two watches: a dark blue Tetra and the director’s cut, limited edition Autobahn A7. Before my trip to Lisbon, I'd pitched them a sort of “watch travels” thing: it would consist of me going to a different city and shooting watches in a completely different environment than Berlin, which is where I usually shot. This meant leaning into a new culture, new sights, and new spots to use as context for watch photography. So, under this new and exciting premise, I’d get to shoot a limited edition watch on a much different rock, rail, tree or whatever surface than I usually did. In retrospect, I am constantly in a tight-rope knife fight with some easily transferable deadly disease based on these life choices. “Oh, this?” I would say to my wife, “Tis but a scratch, a little graze of tuberculosis!”. 

Thankfully, all of the Nomos watches I’ve had the pleasure of wearing have been light in terms of their weight on the wrist which is an ideal factor for me while traveling. However, the Nomos watches are very close to being near weightless. Some may even say distractingly light. I favor my Rolex Explorer 14270 and always advise people who are thinking of getting one that it's barely noticeable on the wrist. Then I had the pleasure of wearing my very first Nomos watch, the Orion. That is a delicate timepiece. Beautiful, but I would stiff arm someone’s grandmother if they came too close while I was wearing it. The Nomos Club and Tetra were also fairly light when I borrowed them but the Autobahn hit a sweet spot for my wrist. But of course it did, its case was made of stainless steel. 

In short, it's the sort of watch you want to travel with, easy to manage, easy to read. It has a noticeably thinner but tipped with an explosive reddish orange minute hand that demands you (if not only to determine the time) admire its sweep. The deep blue was offset by fiery accents and clear summer day yellows. To be honest, it caught me off guard. It wouldn’t be a watch I’d normally go for since my preferences lean towards simpler, muted dials. Granted, I do love a good complimentary color scheme. The watch was both simple and complex but balanced itself in a way that wasn’t distracting or notably gimmicky. Like a magic trick you see once and then immediately grow bored of. That it was a limited edition was an afterthought and scanning the website even now and seeing “Sold Out” doesn’t quite move me to think of it as anything other than a very cool looking timepiece. Though admittedly when I asked if I could borrow it once before, I was hit with a kind and politely worded, “Uhhhh….probably not?”, from the lovely folks at Nomos.

What I didn’t know at the start was that of this particular journey, while both watches were absolutely perfect for different reasons, one stood above the other in echoing, for lack of a better term “vibe” of the city: the Autobahn held an edge, the intangible tug of sibling familiarity. The “brother from another mother”, as it were. It wasn’t until later that I would fully come to appreciate the parallels between that watch and that city.

Lisbon, or on the macro, Portugal, has a tale as old as time amongst the lands that would become the blueprint of modern Europe: sacked, backstabbing, another sacking, and a little crusade or two sprinkled in for taste. Lisbon and its surrounding land had changed hands from the Celts, to the Phoenicians, to the Greeks, and the Muslims before finally cobbling together a semblance of a monarchy with Alfonso I. His progeny (you all know how monarchies work) Alfosno number III successfully established Lisbon as a capital city, bringing in wealth, happiness and peace on earth (citation needed!). But then came, as it was a popular maritime hub, the ugly bit of history with slave trading, another sack and seize or two, and then finally independence (again!) in 1640. Through these centuries, from the early 700s until the 17th century, the people of Portugal were not ones to let what they perceived as their status quo go. It may have taken them a while but they, Lisbon in particular, are a sea people. They have a special kind of resiliency. So, as kings and conquerors came and went, Lisbon rose to stay independently, authentically themselves, time and time again.

Meanwhile, I was celebrating my independence from stairs. I hadn’t known that tucked away in my little hotel would be the blessing of an elevator and the universe had been kind enough to grace me with one. Me! A man who climbs five flights of German made stairs every day (and yes there is a difference, I believe, in the architectural steepness of some countries’ stairs) found benevolence in a button push. I did not know that Lisbon was known for its hills and I did not know that I would be continuously walking uphill everywhere I went, even to buy a toothbrush. The small mercy for me was that the bracelet the Autobahn had come with was utterly unique: instead of a solid band or even mesh, several circular holes had been cut in it, like perfect portholes with a view of my wrist that allowed at least a little part of me to breathe. 

“...and thank you for that,” I huffed, after finishing a colorfully worded rant about those damned (beautiful) hills. And I really was thankful to whomever had designed the bracelet. Not only for the relief but because of the form and aesthetic. It just rubbed me the right way in the same way people were rubbed the wrong way over it; not just with the bracelet either. The watch did, after all, take its cues from vintage sports cars (that is a hobby that I have found, like others before it, extremely polarizing). But to butcher an old something or another floating around the motivational space: you will inevitably be both liked and disliked as long as you're being your authentic self. Which is a good thing, in the vacuum of art and design, to be remembered at all rather than trading that for the mid-tier, lukewarm approval of mediocrity. 

Bauhaus. Conjuring the word, you know exactly what I’m talking about with the curves, and the form, and the function, and the clean lines. So, echoing that particular minimalistic spirit, that is all the history we’ll spend on it. The same can go with any Nomos write up produced in the past half decade (go ahead and google, I’ll wait) so I wont tread the staircase that my peers have walked and instead take an elevator to Mr. Werner Aisslinger. Aisslinger, a veteran of design, daring, and authenticity in so many things (including couches), designed the Autobahn among those flexible pillars of Bauhaus inspired creativity. The man who created the famous LoftCube was tasked with bringing that same energy, the same soul to a watch. From his own website, Aisslinger proposes, “Today, no object or architecture project is able to survive without an intriguing story.”. What he needed to design was a watch that had both longevity and some of that authenticity for it to make its own story.

On November 1 1755, Lisbon, a booming and bustling trade port, was hit with an earthquake that devastated the city. In its wake came a tsunami and a scourge of fires. But people back then (if not to get on a soapbox (if they could) would say, “Back in my day, our entire city was destroyed but we didn’t spend time on our phones posting about it!”) wasted no time in rebuilding their paradise. Indeed, a Mr. Sebastião José de Carvalho, the first Marquis to you, was elected to help facilitate the rebuilding of Lisbon. And this man surveyed the damage, the land, the reserves of money they had left over, and nurtured a storm of a spirit that would tear outwards across generations that lived, breathed, and died by the sea: “What now? We bury the dead and heal the living”. And so they did.

I sat in my hotel room on the second day of the trip, the door to the balcony held wide open in hopes of catching a stray breeze. There was no air conditioning in the hotel room which made my May visit dicey at best but that was the least of my worries. I had put in my headphones and was channeling one of the fundamental forces of the universe to check the anxiety, dread, and apprehension swirling like a double-helixed galaxy in my guts. The gravity I was pulling in, masking itself as concentrated meditation, condensed and then collapsed into a bitter black hole. My shirt was damp with a sweat not made from the heat and my mouth felt like someone had poured month old corn flakes into it. I logged into my work email, selected a day-of invite that had popped up in my phone notifications, and made it through a six and a half minute call with a man two levels removed from the CEO. I was told that they were laying off a dozen or so employees, including myself, effectively immediately. I stared back at my shadowed reflection in the wake of that call, long enough for my arms to begin sticking to the faux-wooden armrests. I called my wife a little while after in a mono tone and explained to her the situation. With her grace and understanding, she asked if I wanted to come home early and figure out my next steps. 

I would like to say the next part was me acting bravely or putting up a good front. But mostly, I just looked down at the yellow and blue intricate dial of the Nomos that was then on my wrist and thought, “Well this will make a great story later…” I sighed, changed shirts, brushed my teeth, avoided looking at myself in the mirror, and out the door I went to capture a watch and a city.

“Nomos”, meaning “rule” or “law”, meant I wouldn’t have my grief dictate the flow of this adventure. Or, at the best of what I could do, not let it consume my trip; but more importantly my life. My time was precious. It is the only resource you can't replace, after all. Watches are, yes, a tool. They can be gifts. They are tokens of appreciation, measurements of milestones. But, more often than not, they are the silent arbiters of our day to day. The patient observer of how we spend moments in the minutiae, the unnoticed habits, everything. They follow and track the experience of the individual, subtly, gently nudging them towards the next. 

And for this adventure, I needed the Autobahn. The simple but loudly colorful. Low key yet charming. Something crafted with a purpose, not for it. Which Aisslinger knew. Which Aisslinger did.

Up and down those hills I went, one tired shoe in front of the other. I slipped the watch from my wrist to the rails where the vibrant streetcars rose and fell like tiny sunrises and sunsets, to the tired but beautiful columns. The people there were like people everywhere on a Wednesday morning: going through the motions, getting ready for it all. Some waited for the streetcars, the others the trains. Some lounged in doorways, preparing to take up their post as “The Regular” in front of the shops; that old bittered guard who wear cabbie hats or loud floral dresses, who chain smoke like an art form and seem to always be proverbially somewhere between 60 and 94. But in all of them a restless, kind of coiled energy was there. Not dormant. These people were people who spent their lives around waves. Unconsciously or not, they carried the same power. A vibrancy and depth I hadn’t met yet in my life.

The people of Lisbon (the generations after anyway) who had survived an earthquake and essentially regrew the city had another chance to prove themselves in the late 20th century. Not only as masters of design but of longevity, of immortality born from both form and function; a people who had learned their lessons, knew their story the hard way. In the 1998 World Expo, Lisbon perhaps over delivered in attractions, elements, wonders, and so on bringing in roughly 11 million visitors for its entire run (Findling and Pelle 2008, 416). Because they had never lost the drive, the vibe, the heart to relentlessly push the greatness that the Marquis had instilled before. 

Unforgettable world cups have come and gone, the Olympics tumbling through cities as a celebration of human endurance skill, and even world exhibitions illustrating the strength of human genius and creativity. But they had all left (and some still do) the concrete evidence of human hubris, of arrogance (McCarriston 2022). Massive stadiums gone empty, buildings with no purpose. Or worse: the slow bloodletting to recoup some of the costs of the worldwide events by using price gouging parking lots. Lisbon entertained none of that, building the impressive Vasco da Gama Bridge which still stands today and repurposing the Knowledge of the Seas Pavilion which became an interactive museum. After all of this, Lisbon gestured to its new monuments as if to say to the world, “See? That is how you do it! You don't design for the moment itself but to last!”

I stumbled across the Igreja e Mosteiro de São Vicente de Fora, the Miradouro de Santa Luzia, and took the less scenic route for a view of the bridge all while wearing that watch. And although architecture like this had been built all the world over (and maybe you’d even seen some of it passing by as a screensaver) the sights, these spots, demanded quiet in a way that startled me then. A kind of reverence reverberated from them, the world’s kindest librarian putting a finger to their lips, inviting you to just take in this richness of a culture that got it right. That didn't stop me or 80 other people from succumbing to the need to instagram the spots. But for a minute there, it was pretty copacetic.

I wasn’t wearing headphones as I kept moving up yet another hill that had deceptively looked like a short incline at first but it eventually tapered off and gave my knees a rest. Typically, I don’t like to wear headphones at all while traveling around a foreign city in the near dark for obvious reasons. Which meant I was able to catch, capture, and hold on to a tune that would haunt me for weeks. I started walking downhill after being a little discouraged over missing what I considered prime real estate to view golden hour across the sea. So I was compensating by putting the Autobahn on a streetcar rail (don’t knock it ‘til you try it, it gets pretty good results) in the middle of the street. After hurriedly scooping up the watch and waving apologetically to an annoyed car driver that had crept up behind me on their morning commute, I heard the song coming from an AM/FM radio (that couldn’t be more than six years younger than myself) in a nearby shop.

“Rosa Enjeitada”

It's a Fado song. Every culture has their own music, their own ways to express those long days, insomniatic nights, what it's like to live, and what it's like to lose. Like some cultural bits and bobs, it doesn’t have a concrete origin. Maybe it was the 20th century that Fado came to be, maybe earlier, maybe in the 1950’s. All I know is, as an enjoyer of the more “depressing” music (it wasn’t a phase, Ma), this was my jam.

Melancholic. Downtrodden. Fate. Destiny. Transgression. Core words used to describe a music that does without all the frills and gets down to the meat of the human sorrow and grips it tight. After spending so much time researching and humming to myself, the voice had faded to memory up until a few months ago. I’d hoped it was the Queen of Fado herself, Amalia Rodrigues, or at the very least, Maria Teresa de Noronha when I finally tracked it down; both voices distinct but God do the nails of the music drag themselves down your back, making you start with goosebumps as you settle back into the mood. The closest mainstream equivalent, or at least easily recognizable, is the blues. It doesn’t mince around with what it's trying to say. This is some sad shit and you’re going to feel it because you know it. 

So there I went with my blue and yellow dial watch with the fiery accents, catching stray feelings like rubber bullets to my senses and I got it. Or at the very least glimpsed the soul of that city, took that in, and let it flow through me. If it had been any other time, any other place, with any other timepiece…well not to give into the handkerchief dropping dramatics but I don’t think I would’ve gone out and produced half of what I did with those last 24 hours. It was me, some bitter other emotions I was shoving in my emotional compartmentalization file cabinet (“See you in therapy, prick,” I’d thought), a city with a freakin’ fortress at its peak, and a borrowed watch and dammit I was going to get the most out of it all.

Like all the forgotten, the restless souls, the hopeless and folks who are at the end of the rope, I was drawn to the water. True to form with Lisbon weather, golden hour was being devoured by steel clouds and waters. The colorful ships rocked unattended in the bay, caught in between the open hostility of the coming storm and the bright backdrop of the city behind; like the well lit stage and a dark, hungry audience beyond. Luckily for me, the trek to the water was mostly a downhill one. I kept myself busy, capturing everything and anything that brought the slightest hiccup of, “Huh, that's kind of neat.” This turned out to be mostly using the houses as color backdrops or noting the upside down, parabolic nature of those streets that seemed to stretch on and on. Two blocks before the city faded back (all coastal cities respectfully halt at an invisible line in the proverbial sand), the architecture shifted much like the weather. Plain, bold and solid colors of bright whites and pastel pinks gave way to these…indescribable patterned houses. Swirling blues and greens with tiles painted with tendrils and vines creeping in the confines of each individual square but fully conquering the faces of the walls. Or intricate swoops and complex, repeating symbols painted on infinitely across the walled faces.

A masterclass in design. 

It was like a love letter from the city itself, a last cry before the primordial simplicity of the open water. 

“This is not the only beauty,” It seemed to say, “And this is not goodbye.”

My three days were up. I thanked my hotel receptionist, nodded in respect to the elevator, and told myself I wasn’t going to try to navigate the subway again (I am absolutely the worst with directions even with Google maps). To Uber I went under an overcast sky that reminded me of tired, gray wrinkled bed sheets. I looked down at the Autobahn and wiped off the dial which held my hurried smudges from rushing to pack. I was bone tired and already starting to get that light glaze of “travel worn” that requires an immediate shower once you got home.

I was glad I came.

Lisbon is an honest city, authentic because it's unique and unique because it's authentic. It is a place that doesn’t try to be anything other than it is, that tries what it wants, and does it sometimes very loudly. Which I think the Autobahn line, specifically this limited edition version, pulls off the same way. Some timepieces may exist with a crisper, more modern, minimalist chic of the trendier, urban cities and that's more than fine. Hell, three blocks north of where I was staying would have had any other Nomos timepiece looking right at home. But this Autobahn is the bombastic, unafraid, and charismatic sibling to the coastal port. It has soul, which is a characteristic so few watches I know have and is entirely too much of a shame that they are lacking. That isn't to say that all modern timepieces are flat and boring, they really aren't most of the time. But the Autobahn just exists so proudly. And in that design, in its intentions, is the promise of longevity.

You can change the form of something, its shape, its face. You could give it no face at all, supremely minimal in both real estate of a city and of a dial. But you can't fake authenticity. You can fake “unique” until novelty wears off and the seconds tick by before slowly tumbling towards what it actually is: a gimmick or a tourist trap.

It has to have heart.

References

Findling, John E., and Kimberly D. Pelle, eds. 2008. Encyclopedia of World's Fairs and Expositions. N.p.: McFarland & Company.

McCarriston, Shanna. 2022. “LOOK: What abandoned Olympic venues look like now, from Athens to Berlin.” CBS Sports. https://www.cbssports.com/olympics/news/look-what-abandoned-olympic-venues-look-like-now-from-athens-to-berlin/.