Who Writes Watch History? Collectors, Auctions & Power | Alexandre Ghotbi

Who writes watch history?

The brands that make the watches? The scholars who document them? The collectors who discover them? Or the auction houses that eventually place certain objects before the world and declare them worthy of attention?

Alexandre Ghotbi has occupied almost every side of that question.

Originally trained as a lawyer, he became part of the emerging internet watch culture when he co-founded The Purists in 2001 — at a moment when collectors were beginning to create their own spaces for knowledge, debate, and scholarship outside traditional watch institutions.

He later joined Vacheron Constantin, working at the intersection of heritage, technical scholarship, and collector engagement, including the creation of The Hour Lounge. Today, he is Deputy Chairman, Watches and Head of Watches, Europe & Middle East at Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo.

His career therefore traces a remarkable transformation in modern horology: the gradual redistribution of authority from brands and traditional publications toward collectors, online communities, independent scholars, and eventually a global auction ecosystem.

In this episode of Watches & Politics, we explore how that authority works.

Do auctions simply recognize historically important watches — or can they help create historical importance?

When does provenance transform an expensive object into a cultural artifact?

How do cataloguing, research, and scholarship determine what future generations will remember?

And what happened when collectors stopped being passive consumers and became researchers, tastemakers, advocates, and custodians of horological history themselves?

We also discuss the extraordinary rise of independent watchmaking, the globalization of collecting, and how the internet changed the relationship between knowledge and authority long before contemporary social media arrived.

Because history is never simply a collection of objects from the past. It is a process of selection.

Some watches are researched. Some are rediscovered. Some are published, exhibited, discussed, collected, and eventually canonized.

And behind every one of those processes are people and institutions making judgments about what deserves to survive.

This is a conversation about knowledge, legitimacy, markets, and memory — and about the people who ultimately decide what watch history remembers.

Watches and Politics, Alexandre Ghotbi, Phillips Watches, watch auctions, watch collecting, ThePurists, The Hour Lounge, Vacheron Constantin, watch scholarship, watch provenance, independent watchmaking, vintage watches, watch history, collector communities, watch auction market, horological history, watch collectors, rarewatches, horological scholarship