By MARK ROZZO via wsj.com

Through family heirlooms, scouring shops or trolling online emporia. "Heritage," of course, has been the buzzword at just about every men's brand, with a renewed focus on craftsmanship and investment. It's the inevitable pushback against the highflying hedge-fund era, when the pursuit of luxury meant the quest for highly conspicuous quality and lots of it. A typical watch was the size of an Egg McMuffin and housed enough bells and whistles to make Henry Graves—the early 20th-century New York banker who commissioned the legendary "Supercomplication" pocket watch from Patek Philippe—blush. And although this bling-y backlash has been a welcome change to people with taste everywhere, when you go vintage, reliability and functionality can ultimately suffer.

I know from personal experience. Last summer I excavated from the clutter of my desk an old Omega Genève of uncertain vintage that had been buried there for, well, a decade. It had belonged to my wife's grandfather, a brilliant structural engineer who helped the architect Louis Kahn pull off some of his best buildings and lived to be 92. This beautiful, modestly sized watch, understated and perfect in its simplicity—with its satin silver face and elegant hash-marked dial, wrapped up in a matchless patina of history and meaning—didn't immediately make sense on my wrist. My everyday watch, after all, had been a digital Casio I picked up for 40 bucks on 42nd Street. But after staring fondly at the stately Omega, I decided to cough up the $500 repair fee (which is what it might cost to outright buy a vintage Genève), and waited six weeks. For the first time in my life, I had a real watch on my wrist—one that is probably at least as old as I am, outfitted with a new mainspring, new crystal, new crown, new gaskets and a new black crocodile strap. But, as is often the case, exquisite beauty has its drawbacks—after a time, my watch's tune-up faded and it was back in the shop again.

Enter modern watchmakers, who are solving this conundrum with models that evoke bygone good taste and key moments in brand history, minus the repair costs. Often, these watches are just plain gorgeous—worthy alternatives to heirlooms.

Asprey's Vintage Regulator—from the 300-something-year-old British luxury brand favored by royals and rock stars—takes inspiration from the company's 1930s regulator clocks. With a white gold face, blue hands and an alligator strap, it is masculine elegance personified. IWC Schaffhausen's Portuguese Hand-wound 5454 dips into the company archives to revive an old line—super-precision pocket watch-style wristwatches originally launched 70 years ago. The sapphire crystal front refracts light in such a way that the black face can take on a bluish cast, a nice effect for a watch that's all about gentlemanly restraint without an overtly retro look. Meanwhile, Montblanc, IWC's cousin in the Richemont luxury group, has rolled out its TimeWalker Large Automatic, a handsome stainless-steel watch with a pleasing hybrid design: old-school, no-nonsense simplicity with vaguely futuristic numerals that suggest "Battlestar Galactica."

You can't get too far into the realm of new-old timepieces without encountering militaria. Vintage aviation has always made Bell & Ross tick, along with a flair for instant history. (The company was founded in 1992.) The BR Original 126—part of the so-called Vintage Collection—hearkens back to the days of B-17s over Midway, thanks to an intrepid design team that conducted extensive reconnaissance missions, researching watches worn by WWII-era aviators. Legibility is always an imperative at Bell & Ross, and large-type numerals at the "12" and "6" positions give these watches the feeling of cockpit instruments.

The Timex for J. Crew 1600 watch is named not from the Elizabethan era but after a famous address: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. It's a tribute to some of the "style stewards" who have resided in the White House, including JFK. The 35th president was an Omega man, but this attractive watch has a masculine, no-fuss aura about it, seemingly ideal for touch football at Hyannis Port—or steak and martinis at Manhattan's Minetta Tavern. "We wanted to make an old-school watch, the kind that gets passed down from your grandfather," Frank Muytjens, J. Crew's head men's designer, told me. "And when you think of Timex, it puts a smile on your face because everyone had one growing up." It's another example of J. Crew's felicitous partnerships with brands that celebrate their heritage, evoking those vintage Timex commercials with pitchman John Cameron Swayze, who famously said: "Takes a licking and keeps on ticking."

Which is more than I can say for my beloved old Omega. The other day, it again stopped dead in its tracks. Although my repair shop offers a generous warranty, it's high time I went shopping for priceless history—in a nicely priced, brand-new package.