"Dress watch" is a somewhat elastic term; in general, however, you would expect something relatively small in diameter (check) round (check; round however isn't essential and there are many excellent examples of the form with a rectangular or square shape; the NOMOS Tetra and the Jaeger LeCoultre Reverso both spring to mind) and fairly thin (check) with no complications other than – maybe – a date; if you're going to have a date, the better integrated it is into the overall design, and the more unobtrusively it's executed, the better.

The other criteria are not so much design criteria, as they are quality criteria. A dress watch can and should be simple (just how simple is a matter of taste and interpretation) however it cannot and should not take relative simplicity as an excuse to be careless in terms of craft and execution. This pitfall is one that an awful lot of would-be fine or dress watches fall into – you very often see quite banal (and that's being kind) dials, fonts, hands and dial markers, when what you are looking for is the opposite: great care taken in every detail, even though (or perhaps especially when) there are relatively few details per se.