Watches like this $455,000 timepiece can’t be made by a machine—and that’s exactly why they’re the ultimate flex amid the analog revival

Kevin Koenig, a Connecticut-based yacht consultant, was recently helping a prospective client buy his first boat. Koenig nurtures a 278,000-strong Instagram community under the handle @theyachtfella. The Yacht Fella is also a Watch Fella, and he and his client got to talking, as horology nerds do, about their metal. “I asked him what his ‘daily’ is,” Koenig recalls.

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To his yacht-aspiring wrist, the buyer buckles a Rolex Oyster Perpetual Explorer II, a watch designed to commemorate Sir Edmund Hillary’s 1953 summit of Everest. Turns out Koenig’s daily is also a Rolex Explorer II, though his model is the Polar, whose avalanche-white face is coveted by collectors. Regardless: Twinsies! Said Koenig to his fellow explorer, “I knew I liked you.”

Neither Koenig nor his buyer has plans to trek to Everest or, per Rolex, “into the unknown, where the boundary between night and day is blurred.” But the Explorer II binds the men in a common narrative—that if they wanted to, their timepiece would have a glow-in-the-dark Chromalight display to aid their perilous ascent.

That feature is what’s known in horology as a “complication.” The term encompasses everything from second hands to details that follow the positions of planets; it can be as straightforward as a GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) hand that tracks an alternate time zone or as intricate as a tourbillon, a byzantine mechanism that counteracts the effect of gravity on timekeeping.

Unlike in most relationships, complications in the timepiece world are highly desired. They hint that the wearer has stories to tell, that they’re the type who needs to know the exact time in Berlin while they’re lingering over omakase in Vancouver. They also signal a connoisseur’s appreciation for the kind of exacting craftsmanship that only a human can execute.

Rolex’s Explorer II, and Jaeger-LeCoultre’s 2025 Reverso Tribute Geographic.COURTESY OF ROLEX ; COURTESY OF JAEGER

Collectors covet these pieces, explains Yoni Ben-Yehuda, head of watches for luxury retailer Material Good, because “similar to the handmade stitches on a Birkin bag, machines simply cannot do these complications”—a comforting notion and powerful value proposition as we cruise, driverless, toward an AI-slopped horizon.

Material Good runs four Audemars Piguet joint-venture boutiques in the U.S. and a forthcoming Vacheron Constantin shop in Aspen. These venerable Swiss houses represent peak legacy watchmaking, and their most expensive and rarest pieces tend to be deliciously complicated. (Vacheron Constantin’s Solaria Ultra Grande Complication La Première, rolled out last year, incorporates a mind-bending 41 features.) Compared with their tourbillons and minute repeaters, a seconds-counting hand is peasant fare. “A complication, the way it is used in our nomenclature, is a watch that is complex,” Ben-Yehuda says.

A complication needn’t be that intricate to add value. Colored a prominent tangerine, the additional hour hand on the Explorer II pops against the black or white face and points to a 24-hour bezel. It provides a clearer way to keep time in extreme environments, but Koenig, who’s on the road 120 days a year, finds utility for it as a reminder of his home base. By rotating the bezel to local time in London, say, or Dubai, he can make sure the orange hand follows the local zone, while the primary hand remains on Greenwich (Connecticut) time.

> “No one needs these timepieces. Our phones will keep more accurate time. This is about beauty, emotional connection, the transmission of community.”

Yoni Ben-Yehuda, head of watches, Material Good

But that’s also kind of a 101 complication. According to Ben-Yehuda, the industry threshold for intricacy is the perpetual calendar, a constellation of sub-dials tracking day, month, year (even leap years) and sometimes moon phase. “If civilization shut down the way we know it, those perpetual calendars, which keep accurate time for 104 years without any use of computing, would become one of the most important instruments on earth. They connect us to the cosmos,” he philosophizes, “to something bigger than us.”

Watches are time-telling instruments, but more important, storytelling instruments. “No one needs these timepieces,” says Ben-Yehuda. “Our phones will keep more accurate time. This is much more about beauty, emotional connection, the transmission of community.” And the nichier the complication—from the regatta timer (a bidirectional rotating bezel) of the Rolex Yacht-Master for sailboat racers to the planetary orbit positioner on the star-sprayed dial of Van Cleef & Arpels’s seductive Midnight Planétarium—and the greater number of them on a given piece, the more Shakespearean the tale the watch tells.

Vacheron Constantin’s Solaria Ultra Grande Complication La Première, Daniel Roth’s Rose Gold Tourbillon.COURTESY OF VACHERON CONSTANTIN; COURTESY OF MATERIAL GOOD

Jaeger-LeCoultre’s 2025 Reverso Tribute Geographic might announce itself as a svelte A