IWC PILOT’S WATCH AUTOMATIC 36 SPECIAL EDITION FOR THE RAKE AND REVOLUTION

Garments purchasable at TheRake.com

One of my favourite lines in one of my favourite movies comes from Tom Cruise as Vincent in the epic Michael Mann thriller Collateral (2004), when he says to Jamie Foxx’s Max: “Now we gotta make the best of it, improvise, adapt to the environment, Darwin, shit happens, I Ching, whatever man, we gotta roll with it.” It encapsulates Darwinian theory that it is not the fastest or strongest of any species that survives, but those most given to adapting to change. And it was under the auspices of this that the wristwatch as we know it was born.

Although some wristwatches had existed since the early 20th century, it quickly became apparent at the onset of the first world war that extracting a watch from one’s waistcoat, then cocking it towards one’s visage — in a gesture that drew tears of joy from flâneurs and boulevardiers — was impractical when people were shooting at you. Soldiers quickly adapted pocketwatches to become wrist-borne instruments; indeed, the-romancing rake, for whom accurate plotting of one’s nocturnal movements was of utmost importance.