Find me a watch fan who doesn’t love Seiko. The Japanese brand makes so much good stuff—much of it remarkably affordable—that the old cliché about offering “something for everyone” is actually justified. The only problem is that the sheer abundance of options can feel overwhelming. Which is why we made a guide to all things Seiko. It’s exactly what you need to shop with confidence. —Jonathan Evans, style director
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The Japanese brand offers an almost overwhelming amount of options. We’ve broken everything down so you can find the one that works for you.
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Whether you’re just beginning your watch-buying journey or are a seasoned collector, there’s a very good chance that you know—and respect—Seiko. The Tokyo-based brand makes watches and clocks in thousands of styles, colors, complications, and sizes, all at prices that have proved affordable to millions around the world. From soldiers to students to office workers, athletes to doctors to journalists, people love Seiko for its potent mix of affordability, utility, and variety.
One of the most vertically integrated companies in the watch world, Seiko Group Corporation is a behemoth of a corporation, with more than 11,000 employees across its various business divisions and output estimated in the millions of watches per year. With the ability to manufacture its own mechanical, quartz, and solar movements—not to mention its own cases, dials, and other components—Seiko effectively controls most of its own supply chain in addition to its design and R&D processes. Much like Rolex in this regard, it’s notable for the coherence displayed in its collection through the decades: Take a look at a recent Seiko 5 Sports, for example, and you can easily discern the influence of the original Seiko 5 from the 1960s. That same idea of continuity plays out with the brand’s core dive watches and, of course, its reissues.
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It takes three security checks to get into a room that holds a billion dollars in jewels. Badge, photo ID, badge again. And then, there you are: a high-security vault, except it is more than eighty thousand square feet, with twenty-eight-foot ceilings. This was the exhibition space inside the Wynn Las Vegas, which every year hosts two of the jewelry trade’s biggest events.
Though adjacent, the two shows are very different animals. Couture is the trade show for jewelry makers and manufacturers of every stripe, where dealers come from around the world to see what’s new and place orders. The Las Vegas Antique Jewelry & Watch Show is where the finest vintage and antique pieces find their way into the cases of the dealers who cater to collectors. At the antique show there’s so much product it’s disorienting: gems in every color and shape and size, ancient coins, natural pearls, every metal you can think of, pieces you could hang on a wrist or a shoulder or pin to an ear or a lapel. They always run at the same time, and they’re the best places to see the cutting edge of what will show up in the top personal collections in coming years—and, after that, what will become part of the personal style of guys across the country.
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I lived in the same house from the time I was a small child until I was eighteen years old, but I never noticed the two battered shoeboxes that my father kept in a white wooden cabinet in his bedroom. My parents’ TV sat right in the middle of the built-in shelving. Above it were albums full of family photographs and my dad’s family Bible. Below it were two open-door cabinets. Inside, the shoeboxes. Every child knows there is a zone of privacy in their parents’ bedroom, a place where they keep things that don’t concern you, that pre-date you. So I never noticed them. But I wonder, knowing what I know now, if it’s also the case that some things can’t be found until a person is ready to find them.
It was September 2022, when I was forty-four years old and my father, Victor Plohetski, was seventy-eight, that he told me about the shoeboxes. I arrived at his house—my house, the one I grew up in—and began what was, at that point, becoming our ritual. I met him in the living room in his oversize recliner, a chair he rarely left anymore. I unpacked my recorder and turned it on. I pulled out a yellow legal pad. I composed the questions I wanted to ask.
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