The modern men's wristwatch has an origin story worthy of a screenplay. The year is 1900. The setting is Maxim's, the Paris gathering place for the Belle Époque intelligentsia, where the evening's question is less about how much absinthe is too much absinthe and something more practical: how does a pilot check the time on his pocket watch without crashing his airship?

Alberto Santos-Dumont, a dashing Brazilian aviator and explorer and the son of a French-Brazilian coffee tycoon, posed the problem to his friend Louis Cartier, scion of the Cartier jewelry empire and a brilliant designer in his own right. Cartier's solution: fasten the watch to the wrist rather than keep it in the pocket. The idea was quietly radical—at the dawn of the 20th century, wristwatches, then often dismissed as "wristlets," were largely marketed to women as jewelry, and one aviator's need for hands-free timekeeping helped recast the format as serious equipment for men.

And so the modern men's wristwatch was born. Cartier debuted the delicate, square-faced Santos in 1911—today celebrated as one of the earliest watches designed for flight—and has produced versions ever since, ranging from svelte vintage references to a showy platinum-cased 90th anniversary edition with a salmon dial and indigo Breguet hands that fetched nearly $48,000 at Christie's last year.

"Collectibility-wise, Cartier is probably one of the biggest brands that exists," says Tom Collins, owner of vintage watch dealer the Wrist Watcher Ltd. "But there are so, so many variants, it's hard to pinpoint which is a collector's piece."

There are clues specialists look for— them, the number of grams of gold engraved on the caseback of the two-tone Santos Carrée, a piece Collins recently acquired for his tiny counter in London's tony Mayfair. Introduced in 1978, the Carrée marked a significant inflection point in design and mechanics for Cartier: the house recast the Santos in a chunkier, sportier silhouette, squared the face (carrée is French for "square"), exposed its screws, and integrated a bracelet in stainless steel and 18-karat gold. It also went automatic.

The Carrée is my favorite Santos—a cusp-of-eras chameleon that can channel the last days of disco or a Bret Easton Ellis protagonist depending on the styling. When I saw one, I had to have it.

Where I saw it, however, was not at Grays Antique Market, the London emporium where the Wrist Watcher rents space, but on my phone during a red-eye flight from Addis Ababa to Heathrow last spring. On random evenings at 8 p.m. U.K. time, the 22-year-old Collins drops a cache of treasures on @TheWristWatcher1 for his 260,000 watch-fanatic followers, of whom I am one. "Presenting the cleanest Cartier Santos Carrée on the market!" the caption read. I immediately slotted a visit to his counter into my London plans.

Adam Golden, of high-end dealer Menta Watches in downtown Miami, calls what I experienced an "I want that" moment. When he began his timepiece journey in 2012, such lightning strikes happened mostly in person. Today, he says, "you essentially see every watch that was ever produced just by searching on social media." From a nostalgic birth-year Casio to a "Grand Seiko that only three people in the world have ever heard of," an heirloom passed down through generations can be yours in a few clicks.

Luxury watch brands have long looked down their noses at e-commerce, leaving the secondary market to gladly turn the crumbs into cake. The reseller market hit $10.5 billion in value in the first half of 2026, a 37.2% increase year over year, according to research platform EveryWatch. Much of that turnover now happens in feeds rather than showrooms, where a single post can put a piece in front of hundreds of thousands of buyers at once. Even for dealers like Collins and Golden, who maintain physical spaces, social media is a growing gateway for buyers under 50.

Over the past decade, a few brands have taken note and jumped into social media. One pivotal moment was Omega's "Speedy Tuesday" watch, a limited edition produced in 2017 as a tribute to online fans of Omega's Speedmaster line. A community that grew out of a weekly column in the digital magazine Fratello Watches had built a weekly social media ritual around the #SpeedyTuesday hashtag. When Omega's tribute piece dropped, it reportedly sold out within hours—a measure of how much demand an online community could concentrate around a single reference.

"For those that don't get or believe that social media can have real impact," says Paul Croughton, an impeccably dressed London editor-in-chief and watch enthusiast, "that was one of the most prestigious watch brands on the planet being directly influenced by a bunch of watch nerds."

Social media has since melted the line between dealer and influencer, collector and creator, and there is a flavor of watch content for every consumer. My Instagram Discover page is a hypnotic carousel of supple leather and gleaming metal. On the rare occasions I open TikTok, the #WatchTok grid—a tag with billions of views—assaults my senses: diamond dealers conducting on-the-street interviews on 47th Street, authenticators revealing results with the breathlessness of a Maury paternity drama, influencers unboxing Tiffany-blue Daytonas and Seamaster Aqua Terras with gloved fingers.

A slightly manic note creeps into this corner of social media. Its mostly male, mostly young audience came of age in the pandemic era of meme-stock windfalls, speculative crypto investments, and hypebeast product drops. Hence imbroglios like last spring's Audemars Piguet x Swatch Royal Pop launch, which generated headlines such as "Global chaos triggered by a limited-edition watch collaboration" (ABC World News Tonight) and "Swatch psychos stampede Long Island mall for special AP release as cop pepper-sprays mob"—a doozy even by New York Post standards. For this crowd, watches are as much assets to flip as trophies to collect. In a K-shaped economy with an evaporating entry-level white-collar job market, it is hard to blame them.

Golden does not. He recognizes that social media is probably the path to building a community of watch lovers. "For this industry to thrive and exist in the next 10, 20, 30 years, there needs to be a younger generation," he says. "I'm reminded of my dad, who's a stamp collector. There's no younger generation getting into stamps. That's going to die out." (#StampTok would like a word.) How the industry converts that feed-driven attention into lasting collecting habits—without the launch-day stampedes—may determine whether watches become this generation's stamps.

And while the platform and the culture may have changed, the thrill of the hunt—and the buyer's remorse—has not. "Sometimes the chase is more thrilling than that moment of ownership," Croughton says. "You put it on the wrist, and you're kinda like, 'I like it … But it doesn't do what I thought it would do. It doesn't change me as a spiritual being.'"

We do place an awful lot of pressure on luxury goods to transmogrify us. Whether it is a rare Vacheron, Vuitton luggage, or a Zegna suit, the costumes we wear contain their own stories, which in turn tell stories about us. Setting out on my quest for the Carrée I had seen on Instagram, I wondered what story this watch would tell about me: "Here is a man of the world," perhaps. "Here is a man with recommendations for cocktails in Paris and tailors in Bangkok."

Here, apparently, is a man who does not check a shop's operating hours before visiting. I walked into Grays Antique Market and found the Wrist Watcher counter dark.

Not that it would have mattered. Of his social media drops, Collins says, "generally, 80% to 90% will go within the first 30 minutes. Some even go within 60 seconds." The Carrée I had fallen for, priced at around $5,000, was likely long gone.

Then came a stroke of serendipity no social media algorithm could replicate. Wandering past cases of Russian silver and Wedgwood china, I happened upon the Watch Locator, a storefront on the market's lower level.

Owner Rahul Shamshad, a dyed-in-the-wool salesman who talks a mile a minute, keeps a shop that feels more like a professor's cluttered office than the antiseptic or manospheric galleries that typify the genre. He is on Instagram too, the 38-year-old told me, but "to be honest, I tend to do a lot of walk-in."

The experience had a warm, old-school glow, not unlike the mid-century Pateks that are Shamshad's specialty. Those were out of my budget, so I lingered over his deep bench of Omega De Villes, originally a Speedmaster subset whose popularity earned the design its own collection. The unusual hexagonal dial of the 1970–71 De Ville Reference 111.0103 got me: I watched its eyelash-thin hands ticking across a linen-finish champagne face and thought, I want that.

In my case, the decisive click turned out to be the clasp closing around my wrist.

This article appears in the October/November 2026 issue of Fortune under the headline "The algorithm of desire: How social media remade the rare watch market."

Wrist Candy

Four watches with Instagram main-character energy.

1942 Patek Philippe 570

A big watch from a time, says Rahul Shamshad, "when men were wearing much smaller watches," this antique Patek stands out for its presence on the wrist and its rose-gold dial. "Only a handful of this configuration ever entered the market." A Patek devotee paid $54,500 to add it to his collection.

1976 Rolex Cellini Wood Dial 4122

"Modern Rolex is so conservative, but Rolex before the 1990s was a brand that experimented and innovated a huge amount," says Tom Collins. One example he "really regrets selling"—for about $7,400 last year—is this handsome Cellini with a hexagonal burled-wood dial.

2017 Akrivia Regulator Tourbillon AK04

"This was the fourth model produced by Rexhep Rexhepi, the genius visionary behind the Akrivia brand," says Adam Golden. "It is estimated that less than 10 of these were produced in total." Golden declines to disclose the sale price but puts the watch's current market value between $3 million and $5 million.

2022 Naoya Hida & Co. Type 1D

A handsomely proportioned modern watch in disguise, this edition from independent Japanese watchmaker Naoya Hida features hand-carved numerals and an intriguing inset seconds track. "It's very subtle and elegant," says Paul Croughton, who paid around $14,000 for it. "You wouldn't really know what it was unless you're particularly into watches."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.