Post by merc on Oct 24, 2019 2:29:52 GMT
Inside America’s Wildest, Most Exclusive Watch Gathering
By Cam Wolf
Photography by Evan Angelastro
October 23, 2019
Inside Americas Wildest Most Exclusive Watch Gathering
On a rainy Sunday afternoon in a gold-tinted ballroom in midtown New York, the future of the watch market is being charted. One hundred of the most prominent, influential, and passionate collectors have flown in from 13 different countries to attend Rolliefest, a Rolex-centric, invite-only, private watch gathering, held for the first time in the U.S. this year. One collector, who asked to remain anonymous (but goes by Eberhardfan on Instagram), compares the gathering to a meeting of “all the holders of Apple stock. This really represents a very large subset of the vintage market.”
Perhaps a stronger comparison, though, is to the World Economic Forum in Davos, or the Sun Valley Conference in Idaho: gatherings where the rich and powerful sequester themselves in idyllic locales to talk empire-building over lobster. Likewise, at Rolliefest, a majority of this community’s most influential figures gather to discuss watches, put collectors onto a piece they hadn’t considered before, or blast out an underrated piece on an influential Instagram account. Their actions will have massive reverberations for the regular watch-buying public. And like a Davos or Sun Valley, Rolliefest has its own exclusive location: the Madison Room in the Lotte Palace Hotel, which glows from the gold filigree sprouting across the crown molding and ceiling and the gold satin curtains, and where what’s not made out of gold—the walls, the Romanesque columns—is marble. Over a dozen circular tables with centerpieces of white hydrangeas mounted on catalogs showcasing Phillips’s upcoming watch auction dot the room. But what sets Rolliefest apart from its competitors on the zillionaire circuit is the thing I’m most excited to see: a show-and-tell portion.
