We’ve gone through a little period that I like to call the “Dark Ages of Knowing Things,” when the internet had an entire generation of men convinced they no longer needed experts. Why would they? Everything was available at the drop of a hat, and with one Google search, you could have the world at your fingertips. There were deep-dive forum threads written by a retired Swiss watchmaker in Neuchâtel who had seen 40 years of studying the serif on a Rolex dial (probably, but I can’t actually verify that.) It was all there, free for the taking, and unfortunately, completely indistinguishable from a guy who just bought his first watch 6 weeks beforehand and was already writing a buying guide.
For a while at least, it felt like the walls were coming down, and in some ways, they were. The gatekeepers no longer had their gates, which meant that a kid from Doncaster could learn to identify a fake Submariner faster than a back-alley dealer who had been in the business for 20 years if he simply spent enough nights casually perusing Reddit threads. Knowledge, we were told, should be free. Of course, nobody mentioned that free knowledge and good knowledge are not the same thing.
The Great Flattening
The internet didn’t just level the playing field when it came to expertise; it absolutely pulverized it. It put the expert watchmaker with 40 years of experience on the same page as the 6-week beginner, in the same font with the same confidence level. Suddenly, everyone had a platform, and there was no way to tell who actually knew what they were talking about. In a nutshell, it was the Wild Wild West.
Expertise became invisible because visibility no longer needed to be earned — it was gamed. Whoever had the best SEO, or the most click-worthy opinion, won. The guy who could explain canvas construction in a two-minute video with a decent camera and a ring light came out on top, even if he had never held a Huntsman jacket.
And then the big bad AI monster arrived and made everything significantly worse, and yet clarifying, somehow at the same time. Because once you can generate a competent, well-structured article about anything in 30 seconds, the question becomes whether or not the person behind it actually knows what they’re talking about. Now, expertise isn’t just invisible; it’s actively being impersonated, at a massive scale.
The Return of the Specialist
Now, here’s where it gets interesting. When things become scarce, they become more valuable, and in turn, people start paying attention again. In the watch world, we see this playing out in real time. Collectors who were once happy to crowdsource their opinions across dozens of forums are now gravitating towards well-known specialists. People like Eric Ku, who has a reputation for understanding not only what a watch is but why it has value, have become a truly rare currency. The difference between a Rolex with an original dial and one with a refinished dial can be worth up to thousands of dollars, and knowing the difference is not something an algorithm can fake, which is something buyers are increasingly aware of.
Platforms such as Watchfinder have begun to really thrive not because they’re the cheapest or the biggest but because they are the most trusted. In a market where a single incorrect detail can represent a catastrophic financial mistake, trust is the only thing that matters. While the internet may have given everyone access to a wealth of watch knowledge, it turns out that without accountability, it’s not quite the same as true expertise.
Savile Row Didn’t Die. It Just Waited.
The watch world isn’t the only one feeling this, as it’s also happening in tailoring. It’s arguably more interesting as tailoring spent the better part of a decade being aesthetically gutted by the internet. The “quiet luxury” discourse (and I say this as someone who has bought her husband at least one cashmere crewneck and is therefore complicit) reduced menswear to a mood board. It was all vibes and no vocabulary. The difference between a canvas and a fused jacket became irrelevant because nobody online cared about the actual construction; it was all about “the look.”
Savile Row houses like Anderson & Sheppard never disappeared during this period, but they did become highly invisible to the part of the conversation that had moved to Instagram (and let’s be real, this is not where people who actually know things tend to spend their time).
Thank goodness, there has been a shift. The men who spent 5 years buying aesthetically “correct” clothes slowly realized they felt wrong, wore differently, and certainly didn’t last; those same men are now asking different questions. Not just “does this look expensive?” but “why does this feel better?” The answers to questions about shoulder construction or the way a properly weighted fabric moves won’t be found on TikTok. They live in the heads of people who have spent years learning them.
Expertise Was Never Gone. You Just Couldn’t Google It.
The slightly inconvenient truth at the center of all this: expertise never actually went anywhere. Eric Ku never stopped knowing things just because Reddit arrived. Anderson & Sheppard didn’t forget how to cut a coat just because ChatGPT entered the mainstream. What changed was the noise-to-signal ratio, which got so catastrophically bad that finding genuine expertise started to feel nearly impossible, and people stopped trying.
What AI has done, unintentionally and definitely ironically, is make the noise so loud and so obviously mechanical that the signal, by contrast, has become audible again. When everything is content, nothing is knowledge. And when nothing is knowledge, the people who actually have it start to look absolutely remarkable.
The internet convinced a whole generation of men that they don’t need experts, and it subsequently filled their screens with so much fluent, utterly hollow information that they started to miss them. The experts never change, but we learned the hard way why they actually matter.
