How a local vintage watch community reshaped the way I see watches

Jason Lee

The first Sigan Society meet-up did not feel like the beginning of some major collecting chapter. If anything, it felt almost too small to matter: five of us in a cigar bar in Seoul, watches on wrists, drinks on the table, trying to work out whether this might become a regular thing. But that scale turned out to be the point. Nothing about it felt performative. Nobody was there to posture. The rarest thing in the room was not a single watch, but the chance to sit with people who had actually lived with vintage pieces that, until then, I had mostly encountered through photographs, dealer captions, and forum archives.

That night, “rare” stopped being an abstract adjective. It became a conversation. A dial was not simply beautiful or flawed; it opened questions about originality, ageing, moisture, and service. A case was not just sharp or soft; it carried the accumulated choices of previous owners and watchmakers. The more the watches were passed around, the less they felt like untouchable objects and the more they felt like records of human decision-making.

That intimacy also reflected where Korean watch collecting still seems to be. Sigan Society grew out of a simple observation among a few collectors in Seoul: the Korean watch market has expanded enormously over the past decade, but the collector culture that usually develops alongside a growing market is still taking shape. Watches are widely bought and discussed, but the slower process of building taste, judgment, and shared knowledge among collectors still feels early. The gap is most obvious in vintage. A few of us came together with a simple goal: to help build a more knowledge-based vintage watch culture in Korea. Rather than blindly accumulating watches that are merely deemed rare or important, the aim is to value originality — both in the condition of the watches themselves and in the way collections are put together.

There is even a slightly amusing way to see that gap. In global watch media and auction rooms, you regularly hear about Italian collectors, Japanese vintage specialists, American dealers, or Swiss editors, but almost never a Korean one. And yet Korea has become one of the world’s most visible luxury markets, producing not only avid buyers but brand ambassadors amplified by the Korean wave. For all that visibility, Korean collecting culture, particularly on the vintage side, still feels oddly absent from the broader conversation.

Before joining Sigan Society, I thought I was approaching vintage the way most modern collectors do: diligently, and mostly alone. I read forum threads, trawled dealer listings, compared auction photos, saved reference images, and tried to build a mental library from a screen. That research matters, and there is no version of vintage collecting without homework. But solo research has limits. It teaches vocabulary quickly; it teaches judgment slowly.

On a screen, everything becomes cleaner than it is in real life. You learn to categorise too quickly: tropical, overpolished, all-original, service dial, ghost bezel. Photos encourage certainty. They make watches feel like answer keys. In person, especially next to other examples, things become far more complicated. One dial’s warm patina is another dial’s damage. One collector’s acceptable polishing is another’s deal breaker. The real skill lies in understanding why.

I am also not writing this as someone with decades of experience and a watch box full of obscure references. My lived experience is limited to a few important watches: a Rolex Submariner ref. 1680, a Rolex Zenith Daytona ref. 16520 that came via Tropical Watch, and most recently a yellow-gold Rolex Day-Date ref. 1803. Those are significant watches, and each has taught me something. But owning a few icons is not the same as understanding the ecosystem around them. That gap — the distance between possession and fluency — has become the engine of my interest.

The second Sigan Society gathering made that even clearer. Around ten of us met for a small GTG and boutique visit at Vacheron Constantin. It was still intimate, but broader in scope. Over the course of the day, we handled vintage watches spanning roughly the 1930s to 2000, and with them came decades of different manufacturing standards, aesthetics, servicing norms, and collector assumptions. It was not a lesson delivered from the front of the room. It was a rolling exchange: hands, eyes, loupe, wrist, conversation.

One of the best parts was that we did not pretend the category labels were settled. We talked about what should really count as vintage, what sits more comfortably in neo-vintage, and what belongs to the territory of antiques. There was no final ruling, and that is exactly why the discussion mattered. Definitions are not just semantics. They shape how you evaluate a watch. A pre-war piece demands one set of expectations. A 1990s reference, with more modern production standards but older proportions and aesthetics, demands another. The labels are useful, less because they are rigid than because they force you to explain what you value.

That, for me, has been the biggest shift. Vintage collecting is often presented as a hunt for perfect examples, but the longer I spend around people who really know the category, the less convincing that idea becomes. Vintage is not primarily about perfection. It is about judgment. Patina, provenance, originality, and service history do not mean much in isolation. They only make sense when you weigh them against one another.

Patina sounds romantic until you have to decide whether it adds charm or simply signals neglect. Provenance sounds glamorous until you realise that the most meaningful form of provenance is often mundane: an old receipt, a service stamp, a family story, a paper trail that explains why a watch is the way it is. Originality is rarely absolute. A watch might have its correct dial but a later crown; its case may be honest but lightly polished; its movement may be clean because it was properly maintained, or suspiciously pristine because too much has been changed. Service history, meanwhile, can either preserve a watch or erase it, depending on who did the work and when.

What I am beginning to appreciate is that every vintage watch is a sum of human choices. Somebody bought it. Somebody wore it hard, or carefully. Somebody had it polished, or wisely left it alone. Somebody replaced hands, bezel, crystal, or bracelet because that made practical sense at the time. Somebody stored it in a drawer for decades. Somebody sold it, and somebody else told its story. Once you see vintage that way, the appeal stops being about finding an impossibly untouched time capsule. It becomes about learning how to read evidence.

This is also why vintage has started to reshape how I respond to visual imperfection. Many older watches are handmade enough — or at least analogue enough — to show their seams. Printing can be slightly uneven. Lume can age irregularly. Cases soften. Dials turn tropical. The edges of a watch tell the truth of time far more clearly than a spec sheet ever will. I used to read those traits as compromises, as proof that a vintage watch was falling short of the ideal of crisp factory newness. In this community, I am learning that those imperfections are often the point. They are where the watch becomes specific.

Of course, that does not mean every imperfection deserves applause. Quite the opposite. One of the hardest lessons in vintage is that charm can be manufactured. Artificially aged lume, overcooked tropical narratives, overpolished cases sold as “clean”, replacement parts dressed up as acceptable variance: all of these are reminders that imperfection is not automatically authenticity. The skill is knowing which flaws are honest and which have been produced to satisfy the market’s appetite for character. That kind of judgment is almost impossible to build in isolation. It improves when you can compare, ask, disagree, and handle enough watches for your eye to mature.

This is where a local community matters. Sigan Society has been valuable not because it gives me access to watches I can tick off on a list, but because it creates a setting in which knowledge becomes social. In a Seoul cigar bar with five collectors, then later in a boutique with around ten, the learning was intimate enough to be candid. People talked not just about great acquisitions, but about mistakes, compromises, services they would undo, watches that looked better in photos, and watches that revealed themselves only on the wrist. That honesty is more useful than any consensus ranking of grails.

It has also changed how I think about modern watches. I still care about design, mechanics, and the usual things enthusiasts care about, but I now find myself asking different questions. What will this watch look like after 20 or 30 years of real use? What parts of it will age gracefully, and what parts are too perfect to develop any character at all? Will future service preserve its identity, or standardise it out of existence? Those are not only vintage questions, but they are questions about whether a watch has enough humanity in it to remain interesting once the launch cycle has passed.

I joined Sigan Society expecting exposure to rare pieces, sharper taste, and maybe better knowledge around vintage Rolex and the broader landscape. What I did not expect was for it to make me less certain, in the best possible way. It has made me slower to declare a watch perfect, slower to dismiss softness or ageing, slower to believe that condition can be reduced to a caption. More than anything, it has reminded me that watches are not just objects to be acquired and categorised. They are things people live with, alter, preserve, misunderstand, and pass on. Vintage collecting, at its best, is the practice of learning to see those traces clearly. And that is much easier to learn in a room full of people than alone at a screen.

And this is exactly why we always encourage those who can, to join us in our Discovery Studios in Melbourne, London, and now New York. Meeting collectors and enthusiasts in person is one of the best things you can do for growing and developing your understanding of watches. Whether you are coming in to browse and buy from our permanent collection, or attending an event like one of our recent intimate fireside chats with Tudor experts such as James Dowling.