Womens Watches
The Visual Impact of Womens Watches
Womens watches often strive for, and achieve, a sort of minimalistic elegance often lacking in the larger world of watches. Part of this is due to the design constraints imposed both by fashion and anatomy. As women's watches are worn by, well, women, they have to take into account wrists and arms that are often on the slimmer side (and that, failing that, don't need any extra emphasis placed upon them). They may also have to contend with and/or complement other items of jewelry, like bracelets and the like.
Indeed, since a womens watchesare often very much like bracelets with an integrated watch face, many such watches take their design cues from the broader world of jewelry. As a result, the watchbands of womens watches are often slimmer and the faces are, if not just smaller, then arranged in a rectangular configuration so that they don't break the smooth lines created by the strap.
Womens Watches - The Elegance of Constraint
These restrictions mean that womens watches often lack the mess of extraneous dials and hands and functions and what-have-you that often clutter the faces of mens watches. In most cases, by a large margin, the wearer of a watch, whether male or female, really only wants and needs to know what time it is. Tracking the motion of the moon or the date or timing a trip to the store aren't real priorities.
This makes womens watches, in a way, more honest watches. Many of the often "missing" features are only found on other watches as a way to impress the viewer with the design by adding layers of complexity well beyond the necessary onto the face and functionality of the watch. Womens watches, on the other hand, like women, can impress by taking those layers off. The watchmaker is thus free to concentrate on the two core values - precision timekeeping and pleasing aesthetics.
The Secret History of Womens Watches
What is more, wristwatches, the dominant type of watch today, the type of watch worn by most men, were originally favored by women! The first wristwatches appeared in the 1860s but took several decades to become popular with men. Even in the early 1900s, most wristwatches were worn by women. In a way, the history and development of wristwatches is really a history and development of womens watches. They were originally called "wristlets" and were seen as too faddish and feminine. It's rather ironic that today, the arc of design evolution has curved back to the point that womens watches may still be considered to be wristlets alongside bracelets. Some womens watches incorporate precious stones into their designs, which is in keeping with a decorative understanding of the wristlet concept. They may be as much about displaying an artful arrangement of gold, silver and diamonds as they are about keeping time. That said, let it not be forgotten that all watches worn on all wrists are, in some sense, womens watches.