Distilled to Its Essential Element
Art and watch dealer Michael Weisberg on taste and material objects
I wore a school uniform from Kindergarten through High School. When we entered sixth grade, we were allowed to choose our own footwear, provided it conformed to certain color restrictions. This was a big responsibility, sartorially speaking: we had only been allowed two shoe options throughout Lower School, so I truly felt the weight of this decision. I asked my cool older brother for his opinion and he did what, I now know, he typically does in these situations: he told me exactly what shoe I should choose and brokered no dissension. I would buy Dr. Martens laceups and that was that. Bear in mind that this was the ‘90s and Docs were nowhere near the universally popular shoe choice of adolescents that they have become, so Michael’s recommendation was outside the typical aesthetic codes of the preppy tweens with whom I went to school. However, as is usually the case in these situations, Michael was right, and I followed his advice (is it advice when it is delivered as a decree?) and bought the Docs. I wish I could say I was the coolest girl in the sixth grade but they were only Docs, not magic Docs. Regardless, my memory of that moment demonstrates what makes my brother and his taste unique: he has a level of confidence in his own taste level which is supported by the intensive research he conducts into anything that intrigues him.
Michael was first exposed to fashion through French fashion magazines that our parents brought home for him from a trip to the French islands in the Caribbean. For him this offered a glimpse into a world of creativity and pushing the boundaries of creative expression through the vehicle of fashion, an appreciation of his that then expanded into other creative forms of expression such as art, design and watches. Throughout the years, Michael has unearthed various avant-garde or under-acknowledged creatives in all of these disciplines and through his omnivorous reading habits and extraordinary attention to detail, he has become an expert in almost anything that has caught his eye. Michael’s influence on me is far-reaching and undeniable; in addition to my Dr. Martens, he is the person who introduced me to both Comme des Garçons and Barneys, and is certainly one of the reasons that I chose fashion as a career path.
After having worked as a lawyer for some years, Michael changed course and started his own business, originally selling vintage midcentury modern furniture on eBay before anyone outside of a select group appreciated the value of an original Eames chair or a Florence Knoll credenza (two things he helped me acquire, not coincidentally). Michael’s business evolved from selling predominately furniture to vintage art, jewelry and watches, where he again was one of the earliest to recognize the current market for vintage Rolex and Cartier watches. Thus, despite his seeming rigidity as he makes his recommendations, they are never presented without drawing on his deep well of expertise in all things, art, clothing and design, hence his audience typically chooses to follow his direction. Growing up around someone with such highly developed opinions on and insatiable curiosity about art and beauty in all forms inspired my own love of fashion, design and art, although I am comfortable acknowledging that I will probably never attain my brother’s level of expertise when it comes to fashion, design and matters of taste.
Michael constantly pushes himself to discover and investigate new eras or producers: he always wants to challenge himself and satisfy his artistic curiosity. He often finds himself most intrigued by things that he had originally found to be off-putting and talks about how those have sometimes been the most valuable discoveries he has made over the course of his career. This idea of challenging oneself to investigate why something might be unappealing as well as the history or the significance behind a design strikes me as a particularly valuable way to continually evolve and refine one’s taste level and avoid becoming stagnant and uninspired. It also serves to reinforce the notion that inspiration and beauty can be found anywhere, even in places or guises that appear to lack both. I appreciate that someone considered to be an expert in many fields chooses not to rest on that descriptor and instead actively seeks out areas where he lacks expertise. There remains an overall through line of modernism that has guided Michael’s stylistic and aesthetic journey. As he said to me, “All of these things had a philosophical underpinning that was the modernist ethos: I generally went for stuff that was reduced in its ornament and was distilled to its essential element.” Although I sometimes find myself drawn to flashy or trend-driven pieces, those material objects that are the most valuable to me and that have consistently remained so are those that exhibit that purity of form and purpose. Below are some more of Michael’s thoughts on aesthetics and his journey through the worlds of art and fashion in his own, lightly edited, words.
Michael on the intersection between art and fashion:
I don’t see my interest in fashion as disconnected from my interest in any visual medium. I wouldn’t say that I have an interest in fashion, per se, but I think everything is fashion and everything is art. They’re not the same but they’re in a continuum: one is influenced by the other, and the other is influenced by the one, moreso today than when I started following these things many years ago. Art has always been about selling and making money: it was about that when the Medici were funding and supporting artists and it’s still about that. There is a difference [between art and fashion] in terms of their purpose and their utility but I don’t think that there is a hard boundary between fashion and other applied arts or fine arts. To the extent that today, they’re all objects of desire, then it’s even more similar than it was maybe forty, fifty years ago.
Michael on his earliest exposure to fashion:
The first time I realized there was a thing that was fashion as a creative pursuit that was designed and intended to be different and push the envelope of what was conventional and what was wearable was around ten years of age, when my parents bought French fashion magazines home for me and I pored over them and memorized the names and the looks. I was already interested in clothes, but not necessarily fashionable or avant-garde clothes, and then once I was made aware of this world, I did find that there were retail outlets in New York that had such things available. While they were financially not accessible to me yet, I went and perused the pieces in person and so that was the beginning of an education in a whole other world out there.
Little by little I did buy things in high school and afterwards and I did build up a look and an aesthetic that I found compelling, which was generally in the area of Japanese-influenced fashion in France which would have been Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto and others similar. But my idea wasn’t to wear a “look” from a Comme des Garçons show; I was wearing a jacket in a kind of preppy way that I knew how to wear it, having gone to prep school and worn a tie and jacket every day for many years. So I would integrate those minimalist Japanese/French chic pieces into my wardrobe and I had dozens of pieces by the time I finished college.
Michael on his current fashion aesthetic:
Today I’m more interested in stuff that I find is really useful for me in my daily life and I don’t know if you’d even call it fashion, necessarily. I’ve gotten a lot more interested in very small production tailoring, mostly Italian makers. I have a uniform that I always adhere to and so no one’s ever surprised by what I’m wearing; I’m just always drawn to the same thing. I don’t wear black and maybe that’s a reaction to my earlier days wearing CDG when everything was black, but I think just to set myself off from that, I never wear black. I’ve very much always been into browns and natural tones, I like something that gains a natural patina and something that shows its age, and black doesn’t really show its age in the way that browns do. I always want to keep using something that I like, and brown can absorb a certain amount of wear and age gracefully, especially if you’re talking about leather goods. I’ve had brown shoes for twenty years that I still have, I have brown belts that are my favorite that I’ve had for almost thirty years that I won’t ever replace.
Michael on seeking newness and developing his taste:
I’m drawn to things in watches which are often times the same things I would be drawn to in a shoe, particularly vintage watches: the way they’ve aged, the materials used, the tones…It’s hard for me to explain it, but there are some things that just hit my eye right and they look right, and those are the things that I’m always drawn to. It’s not to say that it doesn’t evolve, but a lot of times I find that I have a sweet spot of things that I like and things that I’ve been buying and that I feel very comfortable with because I’ve learned a lot about them and I have the expertise. And then a lot of times there might be an area that I find, for lack of a better word, repulsive, maybe because I don’t know enough about it or maybe because aesthetically it’s somewhat opposed to what I’ve been following, and when that happens, often what I do is I investigate that further and try to understand why I don’t like it. A lot of times my interest moves in a way that is counterintuitive into something that I previously didn’t like, because I’m always trying to challenge myself and to find something that I don’t like, and understand why.
My experience is if something elicits a reaction, good or bad, that’s potentially interesting. If something elicits no reaction, then I probably shouldn’t bother with it. If you hate it, it doesn’t mean it’s bad, it just means it challenges you, and I find that things that elicit strong reactions are usually worthwhile. Pursuing the things that one finds troubling or bad, whether in art or something else, is a smart thing, and has served me well over the years because I’ve managed to get inside certain areas, which were initially not just uninteresting to me but actively unappealing to me, and in some cases they’ve become areas that I’ve become really passionate about. Sometimes when you force yourself to do that, you learn more, and sometimes you find yourself ahead of the curve when you do that because you’re ahead of everybody else who is not yet considering that.
Michael on the evolution and life cycle of vintage watches:
I hear about [the hype around vintage Cartier watches] of course, but I don’t really follow any of that. By the time that was happening I was so far along in my expertise in vintage Cartier that it didn’t really gain notice with me. I knew that Cartier was building in popularity, both contemporary and vintage, and I assumed it would happen because I knew that Cartier was due for a revival since they were so quiet and sleepy for thirty years. The market was completely dead to the point where you could buy things for ten cents on the dollar compared to what it had sold for in 1990. Personally, I also liked the aesthetics of it, and the idea of wearing a watch that was 100 years old that looks as contemporary today as it did 100 years ago was really appealing to me. I didn’t go after it because of this celebrity or that, but it totally makes sense that it happened because the material is good [and Cartier] is historical and significant.
It’s always gratifying when the market moves toward you…but you have to move on, because in my market in particular, what I’m buying is 100 years old and there was such a small supply of that material to begin with that when we finally had that long-overdue surge in the market everything got gobbled up. I was at the leading edge of that for a while, but that era is kind of ending now. It’s not to say that I won’t still buy and sell vintage Cartier but I certainly couldn’t build an entire business around that, so, of course, I have to figure out something else. The world has just been moving on…the world is looking for different things and sometimes you have to look back into history to find those things and that’s what I’m always trying to do. I feel like at this point I’ve got decent taste and pretty good experience in this area and if I think something’s interesting, then other people are likely to as well.