One for the office, one for the weekend, one for the wedding
Two or three watches, and why.
If you love watches, you probably own two or three already: something smart, something tough, and something you wear every day. We think that is the best number to have. You wear each of them often enough to stay fond of it, each one gets to do the job it was made for, and choosing which one goes on in the morning is half the fun of owning them.
The dress watch is the thin one. It sits flat under a shirt cuff, so you can wear it with a suit all day and forget about it until somebody asks you the time. Look for a plain dial and a leather strap. At a wedding, nobody at the top table needs to know how deep your watch can go.
The sports watch is built for doing things. A proper diver's watch, made to the international standard ISO 6425, has to keep working under at least 100 metres of water. A chronograph will time a lap, or a boiled egg, or how long the waiter takes to bring the bill. The Omega Speedmaster was declared flight qualified for manned space missions on 1 March 1965, and the same watch will do the school run every morning without a word of complaint.
The everyday watch is the one you reach for without thinking about it. You can wear it to dig the garden and then go straight out to lunch, and nobody at the table will know where you have been. After a few years it will carry a scratch or two from doors and desks, and you won't mind them at all.
To check your collection, put one of your watches away for a month. If you miss it, keep it. If you don't notice it has gone, it was probably too close to one of the others, often the same steel sports watch in a slightly different size or colour. Make them different in size and in the places you wear them, and you will want every one of them on your wrist at some point in the week.