![]() It wasn't so long ago that your father would hand you a gold-plated watch on your 21st birthday and that would be that. So why are we still buying them? Why do heads of state still give watches to their hosts on the occasion of state visits? (Silvio Berlusconi must have handed dozens to Tony Blair over the years.) Why did Bernie Madoff own 17 Rolexes and seven Cartiers? Why are the most common items stolen from wealthy footballers in Cheshire not sports cars but watches? Why are the pages of men's magazines such as Esquire and GQ, or publications such as the Spectator and the New Yorker, festooned with glossy advertisements featuring A-list celebrities wearing watches that cost many thousands of pounds each? All this despite the fact that the primary function of the watch – to tell the time – has been rendered pretty much obsolete by the invention of the mobile phone and the BlackBerry. ![]() The Swiss watch industry, for example, saw its exports grow from £2.5bn in 1986 to £10bn in 2008. And the last five years have seen extraordinary growth in the sector. Owning one of these puts you in the same club as the most powerful man in the world and men like being members of clubs like that. Not because of what it offered as a watch – the battery-powered model does little more than tell the time and provide a stopwatch – but because of its association. When the £260 model – which made subtle appearances at Obama's Democratic nomination in Denver, his victory speech in Chicago, Inauguration Day and the G20 summit in London – was identified by Jeff Stein, an Atlanta-based lawyer and horological hobbyist, its commercial success was guaranteed. The Jorg Gray 6500 Chronometer, originally designed for members of the US Secret Service, was a birthday gift to Barack Obama from a member of his security team. Its success has nothing to do with its design, or a huge marketing campaign, but the fact that it is the timepiece currently favoured by the president of the US. A n ordinary, inexpensive watch by a relatively unknown manufacturer has recently racked up millions of sales in America and is set to do the same here.
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