A quick inventory of my closet is all the evidence you need to know that exercising is merely a thing I told my doctor I’d start doing more often. I spend a lot of time (and money) on the rest of wardrobe: wearing new clothes lets me try on different kinds of costumes, from tech ninja to martini-swilling teddy bear. But if I wanted to go for a run, the only items at my disposal were ratty old T-shirts with graphics referencing my high school water polo team or marketing agencies where friends of friends work. They were the sloppy and lazily-put-together clothes of someone whose workouts patterns could be described the same way. I had a lingering feeling in the back of my mind that by not working out I was doing invisible and not-so-invisible harm to my body—and I also just started to feel sluggish and lethargic on a day-to-day basis. Something needed to change.

So I started thinking about my workout clothes the same way I do my everyday clothes. I bought a swishy metallic Nike shirt seemingly made out of Alex Mack goo. A pair of the extremely aggressively named COMPRESSION PANTS (they’re leggings!) looked so cool under my sleek new Lululemon shorts that sometimes I would linger around the apartment to make sure my fiancée could get a good look at my tightly contained gams. The final touch: Adidas Ultraboost sneakers with that thick Jet-Puffed sole. Even when I felt terrible inside, I was convinced that I appeared to be on the verge of going step for step with Usain Bolt.

In buying all this stuff, I unknowingly (maybe subconsciously?) set a trap for myself. In order to wear my brand-new gear (which I really wanted to do; I love wearing new clothes), I had to work out. These were not clothes made to laze around the house in or even sneak out to the bodega in—they were meant for gyms, workout studios, or at least long runs outside. So I started using them. I started waking up in the morning to run. I bought a couple of SoulCycle classes. I wore a pair of loose Nike pants to my first-ever yoga class and loved it.

I don’t know if my new clothes acted as a placebo effect or if they actually enhanced my runs through, like, science, but they genuinely did make me feel better (faster, stronger, etcetera). The shirt’s fabric supposedly “wicks” sweat and spreads it throughout the fabric to keep dry. During my runs, I trust that my shoes will bounce me wherever I’m going.

Sure, this is a workout plan that only works for a special kind of moron, but I am exactly that moron—and maybe you are, too. There’s a long history of clothing affecting the why and how we work out. Think of Karl Lagerfeld pumping iron so that he could fit into a Hedi Slimane-slim suit. Or recall Deion Sanders’s words of wisdom: “If you look good, you feel good. If you feel good, you play good.” Even Valdimir Putin works out in $3,200 Loro Piana sweats. The least I could do was procure a workout shirt that wasn’t shot out of a cannon at a sporting event.

I felt better, faster, stronger wearing my new gear, but performance enhancement was never really the point—I liked these clothes simply because they looked cool. Cool enough that I wanted to wear them as much as I did the limited-release sneakers I pined after or new weird pair of pants that were really going to change my life. (It’s always the next pair, I’ve discovered). I love to get a fit off. Why shouldn’t that extend to the outfits I put together when I really want to feel at your best?

Earlier this year, GQ watch columnist and artist Wes Lang wrote about why he loves the relatively unheralded Rolex Air-King: “The bold logo, the green second hand, the white-gold 3-6-9 markers, and the O.G. ‘AIR-KING’ make [this watch] fuckin' fun.” Let’s focus on that third quality for a moment: those radical Mission Impossible-font 3-6-9 markers. As Lang points out, they’re part of what makes this Rolex model so f-ing fun—bold, flashy numbers crashing into the typically understated Rolex universe.

Last week, though, those numbers were the cause of even more attention in the watch world. WatchFinder.com reports that a Rolex Air-King was put to market, purchased, and worn around until someone pointed out the mistake: in addition to its regular ‘9’ marker, it has another in the position where the ‘3’ should be.

In any other market, with any other product, this would be a pretty straightforward issue: an unseemly defect that prompts a stern letter to the manufacturer. But in the topsy-turvy world of watches, what typically might be considered a “defect” is actually a boon to the value of the watch. “Dials with such errors are indeed quite rare to see,” says Paul Boutros, head of watches for the Americas at Phillips auction house. “Due to how obvious the error is, it has great appeal to collectors.”

This watch benefits from a couple factors. Chief among them is the fact that Rolex hardly ever makes a mistake like this—that’s what makes a watch like this “rare” in Boutros’s eyes. It’s specifically because this watch passed so many eyeballs undetected that collectors and those at auction houses are so excited about it. Rolex is known for an intensive quality control process that includes several internal checks before the watch is sent out to COSC, an organization in Switzerland that tests a watch’s accuracy, before it comes back to Rolex for a final round of looks. “The modern Rolex is recognized for exacting quality control,” says Nate Borgelt, head of sale for Sotheby’s Watches in New York. “This in turn makes it interesting to see small variations or errors, especially in modern-day productions from the brand, which are certainly outliers. In the world of watch collectors, outliers mean rarity, and rarity can prove highly desirable.”

Both Boutros and Borgelt believe the extra ‘9’ marker on this Air-King only serves to make the watch that much more valuable. “We believe it would sell for a significant premium above its retail price,” Boutros says. (That retail price is approximately $6,200.) Brandon Frazin, a watch specialist at Christie’s, is less sure a mistake like this instantly ups the value of this particular watch, because the Air-King isn’t a very sought-after Rolex model. But, he adds, all that can change quickly in the vintage watch market. “Other models that were unpopular in the past like the Daytonas with the Exotic/’Paul Newman’ dials are now some of the most sought after watches in the world,” Frazin says. (That’s almost certainly an understatement: Paul Newman’s Rolex Daytona is the most expensive wristwatch ever sold.)

And, of course, there is a precedent for messed-up, discolored, and unloved watches turning into auction superstars. In fact, the whole auction world typically turns on nominally mass-produced items that have morphed into one-of-a-kind pieces. Take watches with a “tropical” dial, for example: “tropical,” after all, is just a romantic way to say that enough exposure to sunlight mutated the dial’s original color. But because a tropical dial makes a watch unique, a tropical dial becomes a marker of collectibility.

Boutros points out that a Phillips auction in Geneva earlier this month featured a flawed Rolex Daytona—one missing the word “Daytona” on the dial. The watch sold for nearly $57,000. “Without this error, the watch has a market value of approximately $20,000,” says Boutros.

As for the Air-King, Boutros takes a stab at the hypothetical auction value: “We would estimate the watch conservatively, likely at $6,000 to $9,000, and would expect a similar multiple [almost three times] of the low estimate for the price achieved as we saw for the Daytona.” Self-help gurus often talk about how mistakes are just opportunities for growth. It turns out the same is true for watch values, too.

Reading about watches can often feel like cracking open a textbook. Browsing—and even buying—means being barraged with inscrutable words and phrases like "tourbillons,” “perpetual calendars,” “minute repeaters,” and so on. So here, we'll be breaking down the meaning, history, and importance of different watch terms. Welcome to GQ's Watch Glossary.

The word “automatic” acts as a dividing line in the world of timepieces. Cross this threshold and you’ve entered the realm of finely made feats of engineering, often with hundreds of pieces working in sync to power the watch and keep time. On the other side: infinitely more affordable quartz watches. If you’re serious—like, thousands of dollars serious—about watches, you probably find yourself on the “automatic” side of the divide.

The“automatic” label, often stamped on a watch’s face, refers to the elaborate chain of gears, springs, and rotating weights that keep it going. By comparison, quartz watches—which run according to the frequency of a quartz mineral—are often looked down on for their simpler-to-make movements. Think of the difference the same way you would a handmade bespoke suit versus one hatched in a jiffy by a fast-fashion brand: they might both look good, but one signals highest quality.

Almost all luxury watches made today are automatic, even though the technology was only introduced relatively recently. Originally, watches got their juice from the wearer manually turning the crown over and over: this tightened the spring inside the watch that sent its hands circling. To lessen the burden, watch inventors got creative.

The story of the automatic movement begins slowly. In the 1770s, Swiss watchmaker Abraham-Louis Perrelet created a way for the watch movement to generate power from the movement created by the wearer naturally going about their day—steering ships, drafting the Declaration of Independence, or whatever else one did 250 years ago. The movement kept the weight swinging and coiling the spring tighter together. A couple years after Perrelet, Abraham-Louis Breguet, a famous watch inventor who created the tourbillon, made his own version of the automatic watch: this one had a movement powered by a weight that swung against a pair of springs. But these timepieces (strictly pocket watches at this point) were too complex and expensive to produce in large quantities, if at all. So after the early 1800s, people like Breguet stopped bothering to make watches with automatic movements. The technology wallowed in the ether for over 100 years.

The British watch repairman John Harwood picked up the cause of automatic movements in the 1920s, inventing a “bumper” system that pushed a weight back and forth in a semicircle and wound the spring that powered the watch in the process. This was the first commercially available automatic wristwatch. In 1933, Rolex created a weight that rotated a full 360° that closely mirrors the system automatic watches use today.

From there, automatic watches took over as the standard for high-end timepieces, so much so that other pieces of technology rushed to keep up with horology’s new favorite timekeeping method. Eventually, it drove further innovation: in 1969, this sparked Zenith, the Heuer-Breitling-Hamilton group, and Seiko all to rush to stuff a chronograph into a watch with an automatic movement.

While some watch houses still make self-wound mechanical watches, automatics now make up a majority of the luxury timepiece market. (Luxury brands like Patek Philippe, Rolex, and Cartier often use quartz as a way to bump the price of high-end watches down into more attainable prices.) The movement maintains the mechanical tradition of timepieces while updating it with the sort of ease and simplicity we expect of our gadgets in the 21st century. But the term works as an adjective, too. What better compliment to give a status-bestowing object than “automatic?”