What Watch to Wear in a Sketchy Neighbourhood

The watch you couldn't sell on a corner if you tried.

The F-91W has been in continuous production since 1989, costs under €20, and is the closest thing the watch world has to a non-status object. The resin case is matte black, the LCD reads as cheap because it is cheap, and the strap fits anything. It runs for seven years on a battery you can replace at any newsagent. If somebody tries to take it from you, the financial calculation has gone wrong somewhere on their end. Wear one, then keep wearing it after the trip is over: it's the only watch in the catalogue that everyone from a teenager to a hedge-fund manager has worn unironically.

The Square. Designed to survive a 10m drop and three different burglaries.

The original 5600 case is the closest thing the genre has to industrial protection in a watch. The resin bezel is replaceable; the module is shock-mounted; the screen is barely worth scratching. Around €70 retail, with parts you can buy from any AD or eBay seller. It looks like a late-90s tool watch because it is one. The advantage of the Square over the more recent metal Casioaks is exactly the visual register: it reads as kid's watch from twenty paces, which is the whole job description here. A petrol-station twenty in your pocket and a 5600 on the wrist will get you through most cities at most hours.

Soviet field-watch lineage, no resale market in any country you'd visit.

If you want a mechanical watch and a near-zero risk of someone knowing what it is, the Vostok Komandirskie is the answer. Under €100 new, automatic 2416B movement, screw-down crown, and a printed dial that looks like a Soviet army-supply catalogue from 1976 because that's effectively what it is. Vostok has been making the same watch in Chistopol since the 1960s. The bracelet is awful and you're going to swap it for a NATO strap; that's correct here, since a NATO drops the perceived value further. Service intervals are theoretical (the movement runs for a decade or until you drop it from a roof). The watch reads as strange rather than valuable, which is exactly what you want.

Looks like the watch your accountant wears, which is the goal.

The SNK809 is the entry-level Seiko 5 in matte black: a 37mm field-watch case, in-house 7S26 automatic, day-date at three, and a stamped-steel construction that costs around €110. It's the watch a generation of forum users discovered as their first mechanical and then quietly kept wearing for a decade. Critically: it doesn't read as luxury. The acrylic-look hardlex crystal, the unbranded NATO strap, and the matte case all push the watch into the I work in IT and I keep my receipts register. Anyone who would target you for a watch they recognise won't recognise this one.

Drugstore-counter classic. Already lost.

The Timex Easy Reader is what a watch looks like if you describe a watch to a stranger over the phone. White dial, large Arabic numerals, brown leather strap, gold-tone case, Indiglo backlight. €40 at any pharmacy. The strap fails before the movement does. It is functionally invisible: glancing at one tells the observer nothing about the wearer except that they once stopped at a drugstore. That's the right amount of information to give in a parking-lot conversation. Think of it as a wristwatch in the same way a paperback is a book - utility model, not statement piece, and the loss is the cost of a coffee.