Talking Watches: With Michael Friedman - Former Head Of Complications At Audemars Piguet And Founder Of Pattern Recognition
There are a handful of people in the watch industry whose fingerprints are on nearly every era of watchmaking and enthusiasm, and Michael Friedman is one of them. He's been the kid in the archives of the National Watch and Clock Museum, the specialist at Christie's fielding calls from Eric Clapton, the American who moved to Switzerland to become Audemars Piguet's Head of Complications, and, as of this year, the founder of his own independent watch company. Somewhere in between, he became the answer to a trivia question about a Kendrick Lamar lyric. Friedman will tell you none of that was the plan. Instead, it's the result of a decades-long fascination with why humans decided time was worth decorating in the first place, and he's spent every job since trying to answer that question from a different angle. That fascination started at Clark University in the 1990s, not in a watchmaking program but in a psychology class, where a professor named Bernie Kaplan got Friedman thinking about pattern recognition. From there he wandered into time theory: how different cultures measured it, ordered it, gave it meaning. The throughline he kept coming back to was that objects built to track time, like water clocks, obelisks, and wristwatches, have always been embellished, regardless of what they were worth. That idea, that timekeeping and decoration are inseparable, has quietly run underneath everything Friedman has done since, from advising Clapton on vintage Patek Philippe and Rolex at...
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