Turn back time? What it means to wear a watch in the era of mobile phones

As the need for watches has waned, the timepiece has become a wrist-based statement. Wearing one now can feel like a coded message

• Read more from the spring/summer 2020 edition of The Fashion, our biannual style supplement

I can tell the time. Honestly, the big hand, etc, the little hand and so on. I can definitely, absolutely tell the time, but a moment came, around 20 years ago, when I realised… I no longer had to.

One side-effect of the rise of mobile phones was that clocks became decorative and watches irrelevant. As years passed, and my own life transitioned from blood and air to thumb and screen, the need for their very existence became questionable. If I needed to tell the time, I would glance to the top of whichever piece of glass I was using and in the small cracks in between, the shallow minutes when I was walking from one screen to the next, well, I could wing it, perhaps by measuring the angle of the sun.

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