When a watch became a currency
By Julien Moreau, Geneva ·
There was a season, not long before I left the auction world, when every consignment meeting seemed to include a 5711 and a client who wanted to know why the estimate was not higher. They had rarely worn the watch. Some had never taken the stickers off. I remember one gentleman who brought it in its box, inside a second box, inside a carrier bag from a pharmacy, as though disguising it from burglars, and he talked about it entirely in terms of percentages.
It is worth remembering, under all that noise, what the watch actually is. Gérald Genta drew the Nautilus in 1976, the story goes, on a napkin in a hotel restaurant, and the first reference, the 3700, was large enough to be nicknamed the Jumbo. The porthole case with its two little ears at the side, the horizontally embossed dial, the integrated bracelet: all of it was settled from the start. The 5711 arrived in 2006 as the modern steel Nautilus, at 40 mm and 8.3 mm thick, with a blue dial, a date at three and 120 m of water resistance, and it ran until Patek ended it in 2021. This one carries the later 26-330 S C calibre, with 45 hours, visible through the open back.
On the wrist it is everything people say. The bracelet, 25 mm at the lugs and tapering nicely, is one of the most comfortable ever made, and the slim case slides under a shirt as if it were a dress watch, which in a sense it is. Genta understood that a sports watch for rich men needed to behave at dinner.
My criticism is not really of the watch. It is that the 5711 stopped being looked at and started being counted. The list price of thirty-five thousand dollars has been a theoretical figure for years, and what you pay on the secondary market bears no relation to the object in your hand. I find it a little sad.
So, my advice. If you are offered one at anything close to list, buy it and wear it every day, scratches and all, as Genta intended. If you are being asked a multiple of that, ask yourself whether you will be relaxed enough to wear something that expensive to the shops. Most people are not, and a 5711 kept in a safe is a waste of a beautiful design.
The pharmacy bag gentleman, I should say, did very well indeed.