Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to include a new buying guide with five exceptional homage watches.
Within the watch industry there exists a thriving category of timepieces that is wholly unoriginal, reviled by some yet beloved by many. This is the realm of the so-called “homage” watch. An homage watch is one that apes the look of a more famous existing timepiece — sometimes vintage, sometimes contemporary — but sells for a fraction of the price of its inspiration. Homage watches should not be confused with fakes or replicas. Their builders don’t try to pass them off as the real things, or (illegally) put the names of the originals on their dials. Rather, homage watches provide more affordable versions of timepieces that would otherwise be forever out of the majority of watch buyers’ price range. But while legions of fans gratefully purchase these ersatz Grail timepieces, homages also have their detractors — those who write them off as mere derivative copies that don’t deserve attention. Before we get into the debate, let’s look at a case study of one of the most successful homage watches in recent history.
MkII is a small (read, “one-man”) watch brand based in Pennsylvania that specializes exclusively in homage pieces. They’ve made homages to famous timepieces such as the Benrus dive watches used by Special Forces in the Vietnam War and the Blancpain Fifty Fathoms, arguably history’s first purpose-built diving watch. Their watches are faithful in their dimensions and styling to the originals, but are fitted with modern ETA Swiss movements and sapphire crystals. Thanks to MkII, not only could a dive watch fanatic own a vintage Fifty Fathoms for one month’s salary instead of six, he could take it diving without fear of flooding an expensive piece of history.
There are plenty of other homages, from Steinhart’s take on the “MilSub” to the modified Seiko “Fifty Five Fathoms”, that ape the real things, and others that are more inspired by original designs, like the cushion-cased Panerai-like watches of Magrette or the Bremont-esque Trident of Christopher Ward, the latter of which is an homage to a modern watch rather than a vintage. Can these watch companies be faulted for selling such obviously unoriginal timepieces? After all, they’re not purporting to be the real things.
In fact, homage watches are not a new phenomenon. Look back as far as the 1940s and you find the Hamilton Otis, a more humble version of the Art Deco classic Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso. Not long after the Submariner came on the scene, other watches mimicked its iconic design, from bezel markings to Mercedes handset. Rolex even created a separate company, Tudor, to sell watches that resembled their Rolex counterparts in every way other than a logo and a lesser movement inside. If a company builds homages to its own watches, do we call them homages?
There are dozens of examples of companies that draw inspiration from great timepieces from their pasts, from the Heuer Carrera to the OMEGA Ploprof. Many brands that went belly-up during the quartz crisis of the 1970s have since resurfaced, some in name only, and laid claim to the heritage of their forebears — witness Aquadive and DOXA. Are homages only bad when done by a company other than the one who sold the original? Are the currently available timepieces of those brands homages or the real thing?
Browse eBay for vintage watches, most typically dive watches, and you’ll find many timepieces that look alike but have names of long forgotten brands. Many brands in the 1960s and ‘70s sourced their cases from a common source, an off-the-shelf design, and then dropped in a third-party movement with only a slight difference in dial. The CWC dive watch issued to British navy divers in the early ‘80s used the same case as a dive watch sold by Heuer and Chronosport in the same era. Who was an homage to whom? Does the inclusion of a design element such as “plongeur” or “Mercedes” hands make a watch an obvious homage? Where is the tipping point when a watch goes from similar to an homage, or even to an out-an-out ripoff?
