The scream you want to make at a Jacob & Co is nouveau riche. Hold it for a second, because the same scream would have condemned the Royal Oak in 1972 and Richard Mille in 2001, and both of those warped the industry that laughed at them.
So watch what actually separates them.
The Royal Oak is outlandish, but Genta’s outlandishness is an argument — steel priced above gold, finishing where a tool watch had no business being finished, an integrated bracelet making a claim about what a watch could be. Every provocation is structural. Richard Mille is outlandish, but the tonneau and the skeletonised movement are the engineering made visible.
In both, the loudness points inward, at the mechanism, at the thesis. The watch shouts in service of a discipline.
Jacob points outward. RM’s spectacle is downstream of engineering. The Royal Oak’s is downstream of an argument about worth. Jacob’s spectacle is upstream of everything: the watch is designed from the spectacle backward, and the engineering is summoned to make it real.
And here is where the scream should die in your throat. Spectacle for its own sake is not a modern vulgarity invented by hip-hop and diamond bezels. It is one of the oldest traditions in the decorative arts. The Fabergé egg keeps no time worth keeping. High jewellery has never once pretended to be useful. The baroque built entire ceilings for no reason but the gasp. There is a long, legitimate lineage of the object-as-display — made without apology, for people who had arrived and were playing rather than straining.
You still might not wear it. But you can stop struggling to place it.