Fresh from the Showcase here at SwissWatchExpo.
We've got a lot of Pateks today, Patek Philippes that kind of span a really art deco style
and their phones.
And we want to talk about funky Pateks.
We're going to do something a little bit fun today.
We're not going to get into a lot of complicated talk about them because why these were built
for one specific reason to look wild.
Yeah, they certainly do.
When you see watches that are any shape other than round, uh, it's always interesting.
And I think that, uh, with the exception of maybe Cartier, uh, the, a variety of the creativity
that you see from Patek Philippe is just a unrivaled, it's a phenomenal, when you look
at these watches, how much variety there is.
And as you look through the catalog of vintage Patek Phillipe watches, uh, it's no wonder
people gravitate towards collecting them because there's so much that you could do with it.
Absolutely.
And so when I very first started out with this, we, you know, we, we think about the
videos, we try to create them here so that you can have something interesting and fun
to see and to kind of display for you the different types of watches that we care is
supposed to watch expo because we're not just a one hit wonder.
There's so many companies out there that only sell you the most recent stuff and okay, it's
pre-owned, but they only are three or four years old.
We have, we have watches here that go back all the way to the 1930s and forties, which
I think is one of the coolest things about supposed to watch expo.
You have to remember that the watch business isn't, especially with the pre-owned business,
isn't just about yesterday's model.
It's about yesteryear's model.
And so what we should do is focus on some of the things, the highlights of these models.
Because let's be honest, there's not a lot of information, especially on Patek Philippe
until you get your, uh, extract from Patek.
If you don't have the paperwork and all the history behind it, we get a lot of questions
about do you know who owned it?
Do you know the history?
Well, these things don't have kind of like a car, a title history to review to see when
it was purchased, where, who owned it, these kinds of things.
These aren't known unless you have a purchaser or a seller who comes in and tells us that.
Right?
So you could end up with a watch that say Winston Churchill war.
You really could.
And more importantly, I think about this all the time.
So I see Johnny Carson, I see Rodney Dangerfield.
I see, um, one of the things the fellow from Home Improvement, Tim, what's the space?
Yeah.
Anyway, during Home Improvement, Tim wore a, um, he wore a white, uh, dial Datejust
Jubilee two-tone with the Roman numerals and always wonder if he's ever sold that and it's
out in the marketplace somewhere, you know?
And I just saw that, uh, I guess it's old news now, but I didn't come across it until
recently that last year, I guess Kim Kardashian paid I think $380,000 for a Cartier Tank watch
that had been allowed by Princess Diana.
See, that's the kind of thing, and how would you, I know, I'm sorry.
It was Jackie.
Oh, it was Jackie O. Cartier watch that was owned by Jackie O.
My goodness.
And so conceivably we could have watches that come through here that have been owned by
shirt.
Now we have had watches that have been engraved from like Coca-Cola for example.
We've had watches that, um, came from the Chevrolet division for somebody who had been
at Chevrolet for 50 years, seven, you know, we had one for 25 years.
Those Domino's pizza watches, with the Domino's logo on the dial.
You gotta really like pizza, don't want that watch.
But we've also had the ones that were given to the, uh, national football championship
teams.
Even going back to the 60s
I think we had Matt Ryan's (Rolex) Hulk here at one point, or GMT or something really that
vague but so let's talk about the, the fun things about the Patek shapes that we have
here.
Now, one thing that should be very, very clear in folks' minds, these doodads, we said we
don't have the history on these so we can't even quite know what year it is until you
apply for the extract.
That's one of the things about Patek Philippe that you always need to do if you're an owner
of a Patek Philippe and you really want to have that customized personal feel to your
watch when you purchase it from us.
If we don't happen to have the paperwork or the extract on that particular watch, go to
Patek Philippe and apply for it because it'll be a your name, it will be yours and you will
be able to start the history from that point and then you can pass that down to your family
with the history or even sell it later on and people will start having attract history
of it
and that extract is not expensive anymore.
It used to be like $1,200 but now with the age of being able to access things by computer,
I think they're down to about $150
we do have the extract for at least one.
I know that for a fact and that's the, that's the square model here.
What the thing about the Patek Philippe and these particular shapes as I understand it,
these are all considered the quote unquote low series.
Now I happen to be wearing one that had, has just come in.
It happens to be one of the largest Patek Philippes that I've seen in, I think every
Patek Philippe used to make 48 millimeter watches.
Believe it or not.
Wristwatches we talked about this in one of the other videos where they would take a pocket
watch and turn it into a right and they would do that.
They would.
You typically do that with a 46 48 50 millimeter pocket watch.
Now you can imagine how thick those were.
We'll Patek actually scaled those down.
I've never physically seen one.
The pictures are hard to find.
Gondolo, it was called the Gondolo Gang out of Brazil, and this was a group of people
about 150 or so Brazilians that collected watches during kind of, it started in kind
of 1872 and went to sort of the 19 teens.
Right, okay.
And so these people were heavy into the jewelry business.
They wanted to make sure that they were the top elite echelon of watch owners.
And this was a huge deal in Brazil.
And in fact, one third of all Patek Philippes were sold in Brazil during the time in Europe
when watch sales were really far down.
Now, later on in the 1920s in the United States, really from the 19 teens until the mid 1930s
watch design, the competition for uh, extremely wealthy individuals to have extremely complicated
watches was a huge, it was a huge competition and they just sort of fought back and forth
to who had the fanciest watch.
Right?
So Patek Philippes have always been kind of known as being this smaller watch, 33 millimeter,
35 millimeter.
But in fact Patek did do 48 millimeters.
They were all done at the commission by the Gondolo Gang.
Okay.
Now those shapes are called the "gondolo" because the majority of them were either a
square shape, a rectangular shape, or a ton of shit.
Okay.
So we have a couple here that sort of exude that Gondolo flavor.
And that's why when you see a reference number to them, it may or may not be referred to
as a Gondolo because it's actually not a specific name until 1993 because from the 19-teens
until 1993, that wasn't really what they were called.
Right.
They still paid homage to, you can have watches from the forties the fifties the sixties in
the 70s that paid homage to the Gondolo designs.
But that wasn't re-established until 1993 when they started coming up with ladies peaches
pieces, which is what we have here.
So this is more of a color trouble look because it's got the round style.
Right?
Right.
But the thing is is it's heavily jeweled and you see the diamonds on the, the dial around
the bracelet.
This is the same thing that the Gondolo gang did because they were jewelers.
They encrusted things with diamonds.
They had commissioned pieces from Patek that were all diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, rubies,
those kinds of things.
These were not seen all over the rest of the world.
So it'd be interesting to know where those watches are today because I'm sure a lot of
them exist.
We just don't hear a lot about them.
So we have some interesting designs from like the 1970s and 1980s where they really got
crazy.
You know, in the 1970s I think.
I think design got strange with the avocado greens and the shag carpets and the really
strange, you know, pastel colors and there's certainly no rules.
There was, there were no, we'll do anything you want, right?
So you started getting bracelets that were interwoven with gold.
They look like wicker, right?
Little liquor chair.
So this design is just one of those, I don't know what you call it.
Designs.
It's a funky design.
It's strange.
Um, it's really great looking though.
It, it evokes that jewelry field, which is there again, I'll throw back to what the Gondolo
Gang did.
If it looked like jewelry, that's what they want.
Right.
Um, this square piece is particularly unique to me.
I love it.
That's beautiful.
I don't even know how to describe it because in order to really get the great feel of it,
you have to see it in person.
I think even though it's a smaller watch, it looks great on almost anybody's wrist.
And in fact, I could even wear this watch.
What's interesting about it is when you wind it, it has a distinct sound.
It's very mechanical.
It's got a lot of, it makes a lot of noise.
To me that's attractive in the curve of the crystal on that was just so interesting how
that's integrated into the shape and design of the watch.
And I agree with you with a vintage watch like this, even bigger people, you can wear
a vintage watch.
It just looks like you inherited it.
It looks like it could have been your grandfather's watch.
They got passed down to you.
Right.
And because of the design and the overall feel of this watch, we don't have an exact
year for this watch while the extract does, but we don't have an exact feel for when this
was manufactured, which is strange.
Right.
So that's one of the reasons why we don't go out of our way here at Swiss watch expo
to place a year on.
Especially watches like this cause you could have remix, you could have specialty commission
if he says, because Patek Philippe and Vacheron and other companies do conditioned pieces,
there may be only one, five, 10 a hundred who knows of these pieces out there.
And that's why there's not a lot of information on these individuals.
And that's why it's a little hard to say with a watch like this to for there to ever been
a point where someone could look at this and have a, it'd be an instantly recognizable
shape and they know what year and what the model was and all that sort of thing.
They're so individual and so unique that you could buy that watch and never see another
person wearing it in your lifetime.
Absolutely.
And so one of the things to remember the tonneau shape, which is the, they get starts out at
the top.
It looks, if you took a rectangle and expanded out the sides, right, right.
The word tonneau actually means barrel.
So it's flat on the top and bottom and curved on the side like a bear.
I'm like, what happens to us?
Um, so we, Henry Graves was a banker.
He was a multimillionaire.
They were involved in the railroad business.
He was really famous because he created the SuperComplication was through Patek Philippe.
He commissioned this piece because it was a competition during the 20s we've talked
about this in another video.
One of the things that he did was he wore a tonneau shaped watch.
It was his favorite watch.
It was a minute repeater.
It had the first gold pieces internally.
The hammers were gold.
That had a very distinct sound.
The watch recently sold in 2019 at Sotheby's for $4.75 million and so that's important.
Why?
Because anytime you see that tonneau shape, it's really Patek's shape.
It's really the Gondolo Gang shape, by the way.
That's where it originally started and that's why Franck Mueller, a lot of people look at
the Franck Mueller and, they don't understand what the Master Bankers series or the Banker
series is.
It's the Henry Graves Banker series.
It's a historical tribute to that original tonneau shape and that's, that was the result
of it.
Now, certainly they might've popularized it and there's lots of conflicting information
out there about the history of different things.
I've seen at least one article said that Cardiay first came out with the tiller shape in 1908
and that it was Louis Carnegie's design that was then picked up by other people who knows.
Give some of the comments and if you have any comment on that, if you have any authoritative
source about where that first teller shape came out.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, well the, the, the, the really the Gondolo Gang sort started in 1872 went to 1927 so
it was some time during that period that, that that shape actually became popular.
Packard of the Packard automobile series, watches and cars always go together.
Sure.
Packard had his, some of his famous pieces and he was really happy with too.
One of the things that we haven't talked about in this line up here is the Nautilus design,
which is, you know, if folks have strong opinions about the particular design because of the
original inventor of this particular watch and that person is Gerald Genta.
I have to say, I think that might be the best looking Nautilus I've ever seen.
Yeah.
And this is the ladies piece there again, it has the diamonds, the subtle diamonds around
the outside edge and the diamonds on the dial.
And it's amazing.
So, um, it's got a unique design on the bracelet too.
I don't see that, that design on the brace of very, you know, it takes the men's tie,
but it truly is different than the men's bracelet.
So this is a watch that we rarely see here in the ladies for when the Nautilus, especially
in solid gold, right?
It isn't part of the Gondolo series, it's just part of the funky Patek.
So call us, talk to us about these watches.
Add one to your collection, make sure that you enjoy.
Um, all of the things that watch making in the watchmaking world has to offer.
Research it.
And also remember one thing I should remind folks, wind your watch because it's the most
important thing you can do.
I know it seems like a simple task, but we get that question all the time.
So wind your watch, Fresh from the Showcase here at SwissWatchExpo.
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Let us know.
Argue with this.
Tell us things we don't know.
Tell us things we got wrong factually.
Maybe you know something we don't and uh, we'll be happy to respond, or at least listen.