Mr. Roizin of Watch Anish said, “I do feel this is the strongest generation for watch collecting.”

If not quite in the category of collector “whales,” Hampton Carney, a 43-year-old Red Bar fan, is as good a representative of contemporary collector aficionados as any. Starting with his grandfather’s 1930s Longines watch, a gift from an aunt when he graduated from high school, Mr. Carney, a Manhattan publicist (who has represented watchmakers on occasion) has gone on to amass a collection of nearly three dozen examples from prestige brands.

“You have watches you wear and watches you love but don’t wear,” said Mr. Carney, who stores a collection with a value roughly equal to the price of an average American house in a custom-fitted gun safe in his apartment. “It’s definitely an addiction.”

Yet it’s an agreeable addiction, according to George Jewett, a San Francisco architect whose affection for the watches he owns goes well beyond their utility. “Sure, you can look at the cellphone and get the time,” Mr. Jewett said. But your cellphone is unlikely to stimulate memories of the day you married, Mr. Jewett added, when his wife, Brenda, made him a gift of a Rolex Datejust, or of that moment when his father passed on to him a treasured Patek Philippe.

For that matter, a cellphone won’t carry anything like the freight of emotion summoned up when Mr. Jewett fishes his first watch from its spot in the sock drawer.

“It’s a Mickey Mouse watch,” Mr. Jewett said. “I still have it. And it still keeps time.”