Worn & Wound
Opinion: Everybody Must Get Stoned? What’s Going On with the Stone Dial Trend?
Let me take you back to October of 2023. It’s Windup weekend in New York City, and throngs of collectors and enthusiasts have converged on the Altman Building, our old home in Chelsea, to check out new watches from dozens and dozens of brands. That year, I was particularly interested in a new watch from Fears, the Brunswick Aurora, which was unlike anything they’d made up until that point. Yes, it had the familiar Brunswick 40mm case, but the dial was and still is among the most evocative I’ve ever seen. Crafted from multiple pieces of a particularly dynamic mother-of-pearl, I was transfixed and knew that this would be the Fears watch I’d eventually own. I made good on that hunch a few months later, and wrote about my ownership experience in a fairly extensive way. It remains one of my most worn and loved watches. Years later, I can’t help but think of the Aurora as a point where something shifted. I’m sure there were other MOP and stone dials popping up in unexpected ways by that time, but that’s the one that got me, so the memory of that particular moment in watch culture feels very fresh. Since then, we’ve seen a deluge of watches with mother-of-pearl and stone dials that sometimes makes me wonder if we’ve time traveled back to a more groovy era. The saturation of these things in the market, at every conceivable price range, is unlike any trend I’ve witnessed in my years writing about watches professionally. And I’m here to say: we have to make...
