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.

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.

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.

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.

COURTESY OF VACHERON CONSTANTIN; COURTESY OF MATERIAL GOOD

Jaeger-LeCoultre’s 2025 Reverso Tribute Geographic might announce itself as a svelte Art Deco companion whose reversible face reveals a world clock for a gentleman-athlete to keep time across the British Empire. Vanguart’s spellbinding Black Hole Tourbillon, with its time-winding joystick and virtuosic levitating tourbillon, might entreat collectors: Peer into my vortex of descending graduated discs, a mysterious galaxy of 755 pieces, where only the true masters of the universe govern time and space.

It’s these complex watches that get collectors in the $60 billion luxury watch market hot and bothered. At Sotheby’s, the December Fine Watches auction brought in $42.8 million, and included a Patek Philippe with a cloisonné world-time complication and fittingly envy-green alligator strap. “Niche areas of [watch-collecting] have grown in popularity,” timepiece journalist Caleb Anderson wrote for Sotheby’s, “with collectors and enthusiasts being drawn to objects that serve as artistic and horological showcases both of themselves and of their wearers.”

Put more plainly by Ben-Yehuda, “Super-collectors look for those design cues to delineate between good and great watchmaking. That is one of the reasons one watch costs $15,000 and a watch with the same quote-unquote complication costs $50,000.”

“And people that know watches know what you spent on that complication,” Koenig says, summarizing this society’s joystick-measuring tendencies. “Watch culture is, for better or worse, a flex culture.” Horological equals, he and his yacht-seeking Explorer II buddy closed the deal.

Luxury timepieces

Five watches worth a complicated relationship

1. Rolex Explorer II
From $10,600
Are you afraid of the dark? Not with this Rollie, whose abyss-black or snow-white dial hosts three hands and hour markers that, like a bioluminescent deep-sea creature, emit a blue glow in the absence of light.

2. Jaeger-LeCoultre 2025 Reverso Tribute Geographic
From $22,800
Never be late for a regatta in Rio or cocktails in Karachi, two global destinations on the 24-hour world clock and map hiding on the rear face of Jaeger-LeCoultre’s slim Reverso Geographic, available in stainless steel or 18-karat pink gold.

3. Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar Champagne Dial
$125,000
The yellow gold and chunky silhouette would look good on Tony Soprano, but the perpetual calendar—including a dreamy moon-phase complication—in the octagonal Champagne dial of AP’s 1972 design gives it a more-than-meets-the-eye intellectual quality.

4. Daniel Roth Rose Gold Tourbillon
$212,000
A pioneer in the independent watchmaking world in the 1980s and ’90s, this Swiss maison (and its signature double-ellipse dial) now lives on as part of Louis Vuitton’s Fabrique du Temps, which just debuted a pair of individually numbered knockouts. The tourbillon version encases an appealing tension between the 270-piece complication’s visceral architecture and Roth’s flair for aristocratic typefaces and theatrical curves.

5. Vanguart Black Hole Tourbillon
From $455,000
With concentric hour, minute, and tenths-of-a-minute discs surrounding a hypnotic levitating tourbillon, the futuristic Black Hole evokes the contraption that frees the baddies at the climax of the movie Thirteen Ghosts. Available in titanium or rose gold and with Arabic numerals.

This article appears in the April/May 2026 issue of Fortune with the headline “Taking time to tell stories: Why ‘complex’ is the new flex for watch fans.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com