Double-Wristing: A Guide For The Perplexed (2024)

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One of the biggest points of disagreement among the horological faithful is whether or not a smartwatch – the Apple Watch, let's say, although of course you can say this about any smartwatch – is really a watch. The argument is, of course, less one about definitions and more a way of expressing either a commendable broad-mindedness about what can go on the wrist, or expressing a commendable detestation of electronic wrist devices and all they stand for.

Perhaps the only thing more divisive than smartwatches and their ilk, is the question of how to wear one. I doubt that anyone reading this substitutes a smartwatch for a mechanical watch with any regularity, but those of us who wear one (I usually wear an Apple Watch) also often pair it with a mechanical watch on the other wrist.

This makes sense, but the fact is it feels weird. It probably shouldn't feel any weirder than wearing a watch at all (in fact, some people dislike having any watch on their wrist – strange I know, but true) but long habit has gotten us watch enthusiasts used to having one watch on, period, and wearing two undoubtedly feels funny – and in a way that even persistence doesn't necessarily completely eradicate. After several years of doing it, however, I have noticed that there are ways of pairing a smartwatch with a mechanical watch that feel a bit more natural. (The Apple Watch shot for this story is a Series 7, 45mm model).

Wearing a watch on one wrist means an asymmetrical distribution and double-wristing feels odd partly because it just doesn't feel normal to have two objects of similar sizes on both the left and the right wrist. What to do, what to do? Well, you can game your own habituated proprioception by making sure that one of the watches you're wearing dominates the other in terms of mass, size, or both.

At 41mm or 45mm, the Apple Watch takes up quite a bit more room than something more unobtrusive, like a Fitbit, and pairing it with something either noticeably more discreet (a Tank Louis Cartier, for instance) or noticeably less discreet (a Royal Oak Offshore, maybe?) is one of the most basic ways of making yourself feel like you're not wearing two of basically the same thing. Either way, while you're still technically wearing two watches, it's going to feel less like an exercise in redundancy, and more like a celebration of diversity.

This is not so much a strategy for tricking your brain into not thinking you're wearing two watches, as it is a sort of retraining your brain to accept something it's not used to accepting. In this scenario, you don't try to make what's on one wrist complement what's on the other – instead, you accept the fact that what feels comfortable on one wrist is going to be, approximately, what feels comfortable on another and why shouldn't your right wrist be as happy as your left, and vice-versa?

There are a couple of interesting things about adopting this technique. One is that of course, you now have quite a lot of options because while enthusiasts love to quibble over a millimeter here or there, the actual range of sizes that any one person feels comfortable with, is probably fairly small for any one individual. So, chances are, if you bought (say) a 45mm Apple Watch, many, maybe even most of your other watches are going to be in roughly the same ballpark in terms of size. Pairing a 45mm Apple Watch with, for instance, a typical Seiko diver is definitely not going to give you an opposites attract scenario; instead, you're basic telling your physical sense memory, "Yeah, it feels kinda wrong, suck it up, buttercup, I want to close my rings and revel in the presence of a sturdy piece of anachronistic wrist candy at the same time. Deal with it."

You know what they say – the magic happens outside your comfort zone.

Okay, let's assume for a moment that you don't have the innate ability to dissociate from your own discomfort necessary to do two-of-the-same, and while you want all the fun and functionality you get from a smartwatch, you also aren't willing to give up all the emotional investment you've made in your mechanical watches – in other words you've bought into the whole basic premise of this story, which is that by hook or by crook, you want to have your cake and eat it too.

Another way to go at this is to make a choice that puts on one wrist, something that feels, if not exactly like you're slumming it, then at least like you've gone for the useful and utilitarian. On the other, you put on something mechanical that's so refined and perfected in craft and execution that you can't possibly feel like you've got anything remotely close to two of the same thing. The ideal way to pull this off is to have a smaller smartwatch in a practical, unostentatious case material – aluminum will do nicely, this strategy probably works less well if you have a rose gold colored smartwatch, or something like an Apple Watch in ceramic (or God knows, a solid gold Edition Series 1). On the other wrist, you wear something that, if not a deliberate mismatch in terms of size and mass, is as classically fantastic and rooted in horological tradition as you can possibly find (and afford; this is not the cheapest double-wristing strategy).

The nice thing about this particular vibe is that if you can afford it at all you have a huge range of possible choices. A 41mm Apple Watch on the right wrist is going to feel completely diametrically opposed to anything from a Calatrava on the left, to a Jumbo, to – well, why not jump right up to the top of the horological pecking order and go with a Roger Smith, or a Philippe Dufour? If you've worked hard and long enough to afford any of those chances are you're old enough that protection against falls, and keeping track of those pesky cardiac arrhythmias seems like a better idea by the hour. Something from Lange would do nicely as well – in fact, I've seen this done in person; the first year the Apple Watch was out, I ran into a collector friend during SIHH who was wearing a Datograph on one wrist and an Apple Watch Series 1 on the other.

At a certain age, you don't even feel like you're wearing two watches – you feel like you're wearing a watch (that is, a hard earned beautiful reward for a lifetime of hard work) on one wrist, and a little piece of portable medical insurance on the other.

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This is something of the same strategy as the preceding, but it has the advantage of being a lot less expensive for most of us. Here the idea is once again, that creating some contrast is a way of reducing the sense of oddness and eccentricity that can go along with double-wristing. What you want to do here is basically make sure that one wrist has something going on that feels pretty technical, if not outright nerdy, in the amount of information that it presents, while on the other wrist you have something that not only hews to but actually revels in keeping the vibe as minimalist as possible.

This probably works better if the minimalism is actual minimalism – that is, a careful reduction of a design to its essentials as a way of achieving clarity of expression – rather than something simplistic. (This is a distinction which by the way, I have seen numerous press releases get wrong, if anyone from a brand marketing department is reading this. Proudly saying your watch is minimalist, is saying it's gone through a painstaking process of refinement. Saying it's "simplistic" on the other hand, is basically saying your design team wanted to go to lunch early).

I personally do this a lot – in fact it might be my single favorite strategy for double-wristing. I like doing things this way because it plays directly to what I like about mechanical watches vs. a smartwatch – you have something clean and classic on one wrist, and a sort of personal dashboard on the other. This may have something to do with how much I wanted a tricorder – that multifunction sensor gadget from Star Trek – while growing up in the 1970s.

You can make your mechanical watch play for Team Complexity – a chronograph would do it, to say nothing of an open dial minute repeater or perpetual calendar (or a Grand Comp, why the hell not) and use an aesthetically driven face for your Apple Watch. But for most of us, including me, it's a lot easier and in some ways makes more sense anyway, to have the smartwatch set to a high information-density display, like one of the Apple Watch Modular faces, and have anything from an Orient Star, to a Grand Seiko or Tank or Santos, or what have you, on the other. You can even make this work with a mechanical dive watch.

Not only is this a strategy that plays right to the respective best strengths of a mechanical watch and a smartwatch, it's also, I think, the most versatile and affordable option as well.

This is a very similar strategy to Simplicity vs. Complexity but it's different enough to qualify, I think, as its own thing (feel free to disagree, of course). While Simplicity vs. Complexity touches on aesthetics, it's really at its most fundamental, all about the amount of information delivered. You can't entirely divorce that from design, of course, but that's not the main thrust of the exercise.

With Aesthetic vs. Technical, on the other hand, you're really setting something that feels, for lack of a better term, tool-ish or tool watch-ish, against something that feels driven primarily by a design vision. Once again, there are a plethora of possibilities and you are limited only by the size and scope of your watch collection on the one hand, and the number of faces you want to play around with on your smartwatch on the other.

One possible combination is to put a technical dive watch on one wrist, and either a design-driven face or one with a certain poetry to it on the other. I think for instance of something I've done fairly often, which is wear one of the several dive watches I have – Seiko and one or two other brands; I've done this with a Bulova Devil Diver reissue as well – on the left wrist, and on the right wrist, have one of the astronomical faces on the Apple Watch.

While the astronomical faces aren't the most design-y of the available faces they work well in this case, thanks to the feeling of transpersonal, transcendental experience they convey. Seeing what part of the Earth is in light or shadow, or where the planets are in relation to each other, takes you back (ironically enough) to the very perspective of an orderly clockwork universe that was behind some of the first complicated mechanical watches and clocks. With this particular combination you don't just get a pleasing contrast – you get a subtle, historically grounded integration of symbolism and meaning as well.

You can, for sure, use purely aesthetic effects on the Apple Watch as well – the Fire or Water faces are not only a fine aesthetic counterpoint to a technical dive watch (or chronograph, or what have you) they're also something that isn't really duplicated by anything you'll find on any mechanical watch, except maybe for some rare automaton pocket watch (there is for instance, one in the International Museum Of Horology in La-Chaux-de-Fonds, which uses rotating glass rods to create a reasonably convincing illusion of a waterfall).

The nice thing about this strategy is that you don't so much feel as if you're trying to create a compromise you can live with, as that you're creating a sort of wrist-borne multimedia art installation.

This one is easy. Leather on one wrist? Bracelet on the other, or vice versa. Silicon strap on the Apple Watch? Then how about a nice alligator strap or shell cordovan strap on the mechanical watch? You can even play with creating micro-contrasts on each wrist, which is something lots of us do anyway with just mechanical watches – I mean, I think a lot of us have probably seen pictures of high-end complications like Patek perpetuals on NATO straps and while I'm not defending the pairing per se, it's certainly different. You could do that, and have one of the Infographic faces on the Apple Watch paired with one of their magnetic clasp leather straps on the other and you would then have a nice, nested series of contrasts to contemplate as you go about your day (or distract you, depending on how much work you're trying to get done).

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When you consider the really enormous number of permutations – the possibilities are not infinite in a literal sense but considering the number of possible watch pairings and possible strap pairings out there, they might as well be – this may be the most versatile option of all. It's also at least potentially one of the least expensive, although God knows you can drop a surprising amount of coin on an OEM strap or bracelet, depending on the manufacturer and depending on the metal in the bracelet or buckle.

Still though, if you're like me and have an embarrassing number of straps and bracelets, OEM or otherwise, rattling around in drawers and Ziploc bags and unused watch boxes, you have a lot more to play around with than you might think. Double-wristing on this view is actually the opposite of trying to negotiate a peace treaty between your right and left wrist – it is, in fact, an active and daily act of creativity; an exercise in a sort of horological art of collage, if you will.

Double-wristing is something we enthusiasts often think of as confined to pairing a mechanical watch with an Apple Watch or other smartwatch, but – what were the odds – it turns out that not only have people been doing it for probably as long as there have been mechanical watches, it's increasingly common as an expression of personal style as well. Alex Williams over at the New York Times has covered this subject with his usual depth and precision in 2019 but to pick just a few examples, double-wristing has been done by military men like General Norman Schwarzkopf, stars of stage and screen like Chris Pratt, and an enormous number of musical artists ranging from Drake to Billie Eilish.

That this is often combined with stacking extremely expensive watches with bracelets really messes big time with my horological OCD (without which, admittedly, I probably would not have written this story in particular, or become a watch writer in general, come to think of it) but there is no denying that wearing more than one watch can definitely be about a lot more than trying to pair smartwatches with mechanical watches – it can and often is about wearing more than one watch, period. The takeaway here is that if you want to wear a smartwatch on one wrist and a mechanical wrist on the other, you just do it, because they're your wrists, they're your watches, and if anyone doesn't like it, they can go take a long walk off a short pier.

I think probably the most extreme example of multi-watch double-wristing I've ever seen, though, did not come from an actor or a general or a musician (or a revolutionary; Che Guevara is supposed to have double-wristed) but from a modest industrialist and financier of retiring disposition named Nicolas G. Hayek. I say "of retiring disposition" with tongue in cheek, of course – I have never in my entire professional life met anyone who spoke to and yes, gleefully manipulated the press with as much relish as the gent myself and my colleague, Joe Thompson, always called "Mr. Chairman" when meeting him in person (or getting lectured by him over the phone; a call from Mr. Hayek was always both personally flattering and slightly terrifying). "Mr. Swatch," as he was sometimes called, "stacked" to the tune of as many as eight, count 'em eight, watches at once, and I doubt if he ever gave a moment's thought to whether or not it "worked" from a style standpoint, or indeed whether or not it was particularly good for the preservation of a watch case.

Like a Roman general showing tributes during a triumphal parade, Hayek wore multiple watches on both wrists as a way of concretely demonstrating the domains (read, "brands") over which he held suzerainty. He did it, in other words, with zero self-doubt and in a spirit of exuberant celebration, and if the man who did more than any single person to bring the Swiss watch industry back from the brink after the Quartz Crisis can do it, you can too.

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Apple-watch

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Double-wristing

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