Why Smaller Watches Are Back (And I'm Here For It)

I've been waiting for this moment since about 2015, when I first realised my 44mm Panerai looked absolutely ridiculous in wedding photos. There I was, grinning next to my mate who'd just got married, and my wrist looked like I'd strapped on a ship's porthole. The thing cast its own shadow.

But here's the thing: back then, that was normal. Expected, even. If you weren't wearing something north of 42mm, you were either vintage-obsessed or somehow hadn't got the memo that real men wore real watches, and real watches were substantial. The watch forums were full of it. "Wears smaller than the specs suggest," we'd tell each other about 45mm dive watches, as if saying it enough times would make it true.

Well, the tide's turned. Properly turned. And I couldn't be happier about it.

The Evidence Is Everywhere

Look at what's actually selling. Rolex shrunk the Explorer back down to 36mm in 2021, and the wait lists went mental. The new OP configurations at 36mm and 41mm? The smaller ones are harder to get. Tudor's brought out a 39mm Black Bay Fifty-Eight in basically every colour they can think of, because the 41mm original wasn't small enough for what people actually wanted.

Omega's doing 38mm Speedmasters now. Cartier's leaning into their classic 35-36mm Tank proportions and cleaning up. Even TAG Heuer, TAG Heuerwho spent the 2000s making Aquaracers you could use as a shield, has quietly started talking about 39mm as their sweet spot.

This isn't just heritage pieces for collectors, either. This is the mainline, the bread and butter, the stuff normal people with normal wrists are actually buying. The industry's read the room, finally, and the room was saying: "Mate, I can't fit this thing under a shirt cuff, and honestly, I'm tired of pretending that's fine."

How Did We Get Here?

The oversized watch thing made sense for about five minutes in the early 2000s. Panerai came roaring back with their 44mm cushion cases, all that military history, the cult following. Fair enough. Those are distinctive watches with actual heritage to back up the size. The Italian navy needed big watches for legibility. You and I buying coffee at Pret? Less so.

But then everyone jumped on it. Suddenly every dive watch was 44mm minimum. Pilot watches were pushing 46mm. I remember handling a 47mm IWC Big Pilot around 2008 and thinking it was absurd theatre, but also sort of impressive? Like watching someone order a 72oz steak. You don't want to do it yourself, but you're weirdly compelled by the audacity.

The problem was it became the default. Mid-size got redefined. A 40mm watch was "conservative" or "dressy" rather than, you know, normal. The entire industry convinced itself that bigger was always better, that wrist presence was the primary virtue, that if someone across a car park couldn't tell you were wearing a watch, you'd failed somehow.

I bought into it. I've got a drawer full of evidence that I bought into it. A 45mm Breitling that I wore maybe twice before accepting it looked like fancy dress. A 44mm Planet Ocean that was genuinely brilliant but made my 7-inch wrist look like a child's. Even my beloved Speedmaster Professional at 42mm, which is actually fine, well-proportioned, a proper tool watch, started feeling a bit much when I was wearing it to the office every day.

The Shift Started Quietly

Nobody announced this. There wasn't a memo. But somewhere around 2018-2019, I started noticing that the vintage market was going absolutely berserk for smaller watches. Not just Rolex Oyster Perpetuals in 34mm, though yes, those too, but 36mm Datejusts, 38mm Omegas, even 35mm Cartiers that five years earlier would've been dismissed as "women's watches" by the sort of men who have strong opinions about watch sizes on the internet.

And it wasn't just collectors. Normal people, people with actual lives beyond the hobby, were buying them. Wearing them. Posting them on Instagram without defensive captions about "vintage proportions" or "wears bigger than you'd think." Just... wearing appropriately-sized watches like it was 1965 and nobody had lost their minds yet.

Why Smaller Works Better (Usually)

I'm going to say something that'll annoy people: for most men, most of the time, something between 36-40mm just works better. It fits under cuffs. It doesn't dominate your wrist. It doesn't make you look like you're trying to prove something. It's a watch, doing watch things, at watch scale.

I've been wearing a 1960s Omega Seamaster De Ville at 34mm for the past month, and I've had more comments on it than I ever got wearing my Submariner. Partly because it's a lovely thing, rose gold, gorgeous pie-pan dial. But partly because it's legible. People can actually see what it is. It's not hiding behind my wrist bone or jutting out past the edges of my arm.

There's something else, too. Smaller watches photograph better. I know, I know, we're not supposed to care about Instagram. But honestly? Most of us do, at least a bit. And a 36-38mm watch on a normal wrist just looks more balanced, more intentional, less like you're wearing your dad's watch to a fancy dress party.

Comfort's part of it as well. A 38mm watch on a well-designed bracelet or strap just sits better. It moves with your wrist. It doesn't catch on things. You can wear it all day without that vague awareness that you're wearing something substantial. I wore my Sub for a week in Athens during last summer's heatwave, and by day three I'd switched to a 36mm Oyster Perpetual I'd borrowed from a friend. The difference was night and day.

The Exceptions That Prove The Rule

Now, I'm not saying everything should be 38mm. Some watches genuinely need size. Proper dive watches, like, actual ISO-certified tools that people use underwater, benefit from larger cases for legibility and bezel manipulation. Pilot watches with slide-rule bezels need room for all that functionality. And if you've got an 8-inch wrist, you can pull off things I simply can't.

The Panerai Luminor? Still looks right at 44mm, because that's what it is. That's the design. A 38mm Luminor would be like a Mini Cooper stretched into a limousine, technically possible but fundamentally wrong. Same with something like the IWC Big Pilot: it's supposed to be oversized. That's the entire point. The name's a clue.

But these are specific cases with specific justifications. They're not the default. They shouldn't be the baseline from which everything else is measured.

What Changed People's Minds?

Part of it's just fashion cycling back, the way these things do. We had slim lapels, then wide lapels, then slim again. We had skinny jeans, then bootcut, then skinny, now everything's looser again. Watches are the same. Big had its moment. Now smaller's having its moment. In ten years maybe we'll all be back to 44mm. (I doubt it, but stranger things have happened.)

But I think there's more to it than just trends. I think people got tired of the arms race. Tired of watches as status signalling in the most obvious possible way. There's something actually quite confident about wearing a 36mm watch in 2024. It says you're not trying to impress anyone, you're not following rules about what a "man's watch" should be, you're just wearing what works.

The pandemic probably helped, weirdly. We all spent two years in tracksuit bottoms on Zoom calls, and a lot of the performative nonsense around menswear just evaporated. People stopped caring about "dress codes" and "power dressing" and started caring about what actually felt good. That extended to watches. Why was I wearing this heavy 44mm thing when a 38mm would be more comfortable and look better?

And honestly? The younger generation coming into the market doesn't have the same hangups. I've got a nephew who's 24, just bought his first proper watch: a 36mm Oyster Perpetual in that brilliant coral colour. He didn't agonise over size. He just picked what looked good on his wrist. Revolutionary, that.

Where We Go From Here

I think this is sticky. I don't think we're going back to peak-2010s sizing anytime soon. The brands have seen the sales figures, they've seen the secondary market, they've seen what actually moves. Smaller works.

What I'm hoping for, and what we're starting to see, is just more variety. Proper size ranges, not just 41mm or nothing. The OP now comes in 31, 36, and 41mm. That's how it should be. Let people choose based on their actual wrists, not based on what some marketing department decided was "masculine" in 2008.

I'd love to see more brands doing what Tudor's done with the Black Bay Fifty-Eight: taking their core designs and just making them right. Not "heritage" or "retro" or any other euphemism for "the size watches used to be before we lost our minds." Just properly proportioned.

And I want to see us stop pretending that size is somehow about toughness or masculinity or whatever insecure nonsense drove the big-watch boom. A 36mm Datejust is as much of a watch as a 44mm Panerai. Sometimes more, given that you can actually wear the Datejust with more than a t-shirt.

For what it's worth, I've sold most of my oversized pieces now. Kept a couple that genuinely work at their size, the Speedmaster's staying, and I've got a soft spot for a 43mm Doxa dive watch that's just chunky enough to be charming. But the 44mm+ stuff? Gone. And my collection's better for it.

I'm wearing more watches more often now because they're actually comfortable. I'm enjoying them more because they're not fighting for attention. And crucially, I'm not having to make excuses about "wears smaller than the specs" or "punches above its weight class" or any of the other defensive phrases we developed to justify wearing dinner plates.

The small watch revival isn't just a trend. It's a correction. It's the market remembering that watches are meant to be worn, not endured. And after twenty years of supersizing, that feels like progress.