How to Wear a Pocket Watch: With a Vest, a Suit or Jeans

A pocket watch is the most old-fashioned way to tell the time, and that is the whole charm of it. Wearing one well is easy once you know where the watch goes and where the chain goes. Here is how, with a waistcoat, with a suit, and with jeans.

With a vest or waistcoat — the classic way

This is how pocket watches were designed to be worn.

1. Put the watch in one of the lower pockets of the waistcoat.
2. Run the chain to a middle buttonhole, and fasten it there with the bar or clip at its end.
3. Let the chain hang in a gentle curve across the front. Not tight, not dangling below the waist.

A single chain from one pocket to a buttonhole is called a single Albert, after Prince Albert, who popularised it. A double Albert runs from a pocket on each side to the middle button, with the watch in one pocket and a small item in the other.

With a suit and no vest

Without a waistcoat, the watch moves down:

• Put the watch in your front trouser pocket.
• Clip the chain to a belt loop, near the pocket, and let a short length show.

Keep it simple. With a suit jacket, the chain can sit just out of sight until you take the watch out.

With jeans

Jeans already have the right pocket. The small pocket above the right front pocket — the one most people use for coins — began life in the 1800s as a watch pocket. Drop the watch in it and clip the chain to the nearest belt loop. It is the most natural casual way to carry one.

How to wear a pocket watch chain

• Fasten the chain before you put the watch away, so it can never fall.
• Choose one place to anchor it — a buttonhole, a belt loop — and keep it there.
• Show a little. The visible arc of chain is part of the look.
• Hold the watch, not the chain, when you take it out.

A very short history

Portable clocks appeared in Germany in the early 1500s, worn round the neck. They moved into the pocket in the 1600s, when the waistcoat became fashionable, and for three centuries a watch in the pocket was the mark of a man with somewhere to be. Railways made accuracy a matter of life and death, and in the US strict standards for railroad watches followed a train crash in Ohio in 1891. Wristwatches took over after the First World War, when soldiers found them far more practical in the trenches.

Types of pocket watch

• Open face — no cover; the dial is always visible.
• Hunter — a solid hinged cover protects the glass.
• Half hunter — a cover with a window, so you can see the time without opening it.

Our steampunk pocket watch takes the half-hunter idea further: the cover is cut away into gears and Roman numerals, so the time half shows through, with a clean white dial inside. It is quartz, so it keeps time without winding, in antique bronze on a long chain.

Why a pocket watch makes a good gift

• Groomsmen and best man — the traditional wedding gift, worn on the day.
• Graduations and retirements — a gift of time, in both senses.
• Costume and cosplay — steampunk, Victorian and western outfits are not finished without one.
• Anyone who has always wanted one — which is a surprising number of people.

And for someone who likes the memento mori idea, a watch and a memento mori coin say the same thing two ways.