Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal ran a story with the provocative headline: “Should You Wear a Watch if There’s No One to Impress?” Two writers debated this pressing issue. One insisted that, even if you’re working from home in solitude, wearing a watch “can help to foster a sense of normalcy during a brutally abnormal year”. The other writer argued the opposite. He quoted a lawyer who admitted that wearing his Rolex seemed weirdly inappropriate while he was sat at home in Lululemon shorts. Whatever your personal opinion on the matter, the fact this issue was even discussed in the first place demonstrates that something is going on. Whether consciously or not, COVID is having an impact on our attitudes to our clothing and watches. That’s no surprise to Associate Professor Toby Slade at the University of Technology Sydney. As a fashion historian, his role is to explore how sartorial attitudes at a specific point in time reveal broader truths about our collective values and experiences. It so happens that debate in the Wall Street Journal illustrates exactly how he views the COVID fallout playing out on our wrists. “In the 1930s, there was this psychologist called John…
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