Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. So, this morning we had Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, Uranus, Saturn and Neptune line up in the morning sky, this evening we’ll see a solar eclipse, and at night we’re passing through the Perseid meteor shower. The chances that it’s not the end of the world today are pretty slim so I’m off to the Zagreb Observatory to check out the eclipse and meteor shower. Good luck everybody!

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In this issue

• Timex Adds A GMT Function To The Very Popular Deepwater Meridian

• Seiko Expands The Compact Cocktail Time Collection With Beautiful Brown, Blue And Green

• Watch Ho & Co. And Selten Take Inspiration From A Dim Sum Steamer Basket For The Yum Cha

• Moritz Grossmann Brings Back Friction Silver-Plating For A 36mm Tefnut With Turquoise Numerals

👂What’s new

1/

Timex Adds A GMT Function To The Very Popular Deepwater Meridian

Over the past few years, Timex has been building out the Deepwater Meridian line into something more serious than its price suggests, and the people seem to approve. As Seiko keeps moving up in price (without giving us more bang for buck), Timex saw the opening in the affordable diver/sports watch market and decided to slide in. That’s what the Deepwater Meridian is, and now it’s getting a GMT version, as was expected. This is the new Deepwater Meridian 200 Auto GMT.

The stainless steel case measures 42mm wide, 14.50mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 48.80mm. It’s not a small watch, sure, but it’s a sturdy sports watch in the purest sense of that description. The cases have a brushed finish with a couple of polished accents, and the screw-down crown at 3 o’clock has generous guards. On top of the case is a sapphire crystal, something that Seiko doesn’t offer in a lot of its lower-budget sports watches, surrounded by a bidirectional 24-hour bezel. Water resistance is 200 meters.

There are three color options for the dials and bezels, and they’re pretty classic — black, green and blue, with matching bezels. The bezels are split into two sections, one for daylight and one for nightime hours. The black is matched with grey, while the green and blue are matched with black. The dial remains pretty much unchanged in its setup, with a magnified date at 3 o’clock, applied markers, broad hands, plenty of lume and bright red, arrow tipped, GMT hands.

Timex, traditionally, doesn’t say what movement is inside, but we know it to be the Seiko NH34a, a caller-style GMT beating at 3Hz with roughly 41 hours of reserve. The watch comes on a Jubilee-style bracelet with a quick-release system.

The Timex Deepwater Meridian 200 Auto GMT is available now, priced at €549. See more on the Timex website.

2/

Seiko Expands The Compact Cocktail Time Collection With Beautiful Brown, Blue And Green

I told you we have a lot of Seiko releases to get through these days, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. And what a tip it is. The already beautiful Presage Cocktail Time collection, inspired by cocktails from Tokyo’s Star Bar, is getting three new references, the HCB001, HCB002 and HCB003. You know that they come with beautiful dials, but they also get the smaller case in the collection, which is much welcomed.

The case is made out of steel, with pretty good dimensions — 38.5mm wide, a bit under 12mm thick with the domed crystal, and a decent 45mm lug-to-lug. It could be a hair thinner, but let’s not get greedy. The case has straight lugs, a brushed finish and a thin-ish polished bezel surrounding a Hardlex crystal. I wish Seiko would switch to acrylic crystals here, but what can we do. Water resistance is 50 meters.

Then, the dials. The HCB001 gets a gradient blue that looks almost like a stormy sea, with silver hands and applied markers. The HCB002 and HCB003 are a bit warmer with gradient green and gradient brown respectively, paired with yellow gold- and rose gold-colored hands and markers. Underneath the translucent color, the dial base has a light texture that perhaps looks most like scratches. There’s a round date aperture at 4:30.

Inside is the calibre 4R35, Seiko's workhorse automatic and the backbone of most of its entry-level mechanical watches. It beats at 21,600 vph and has about 41 hours of power reserve. Straps vary by reference: the HCB001 gets a five-link brushed-and-polished steel bracelet, while the HCB002 and HCB003 come on light-brown or dark-brown leather with a three-fold clasp.

All three are available now, priced at €490. See more on the Seiko website — the HCB001 here, the HCB002 here and the HCB003 here.

3/

Watch Ho & Co. And Selten Take Inspiration From A Dim Sum Steamer Basket For The Yum Cha

There’s a pretty high chance you have no idea who Jackie Ho is. I mean, I do this every day and I hardly know who he is. But that’s because I don’t live in Hong Kong. If I lived, I would likely at least be familiar with Watch Ho & Co., a very cool collector community. I know Watch Ho & Co. for their collaborations with the watch brand Selten, all of which have produced incredibly compelling dials. Now, the two are coming together, and just like previous ones, this one has a personal connection for Ho. The dial is style after steaming baskets found in tea houses, named Yum Chaafter Hong Kong's tea houses Ho spent his childhood in with his grandparents.

The case is made out of stainless steel, 38mm wide and 9.95mm thick with the box style sapphire crystal (or a very svelte 8.35mm without it), with a very nice 44.5mm lug-to-lug. When I said this was a very personal watch for Ho, I meant it. On the solid caseback is an illustration done by One Hour Watch of young Ho sharing a meal with his grandparents, and you can engrave a number of your choice onto the restaurant's table marker. Water resistance is 50 meters.

Then, there’s the dial, which is just incredible. It starts as a silver blank that Selten's master engraver Qin divides into roughly eighty sections, each hand-cut with dozens of bright-polished lines set at varying depth and direction to mimic woven bamboo, the lattice of a dim sum steamer lid. Then they apply multiple layers of transparent Grand Feu enamel and the result is a color called Fumé Amber that flows from honey-gold at the centre to smoky brown at the edges. Tea leaf-shaped hands round the theme out.

Inside is the new manually wound Sellita SW210-2 M Power+, adjusted in five positions to roughly ±6 seconds per day. I say new Sellita SW210-2 because this is the upgraded Power+ version, which bumps up the power reserve from a previous 40 hours to 65 hours. The watch comes on a tan Italian nubuck from HasNoBounds. Keeping true to the theme, the watch comes in a real handcrafted bamboo steamer basket and the warranty card resembles one of the red dim sum order slips you find on every Hong Kong tea house table.

The new Watch Ho & Co. x Selten Yum Cha is limited to 100 pieces, priced at HKD 38,828 or about €4,290. See more on the Selten website.

4/

Moritz Grossmann Brings Back Friction Silver-Plating For A 36mm Tefnut With Turquoise Numerals

Moritz Grossmann is deep into a run of anniversary watches for founder Carl Moritz Grossmann, born 200 years ago. This is the fifth gift to the man in the series, following the Hamatic, the Tremblage, the Tefnut and the Backpage Tremblage. Once again, it’s a Tefnut, their smaller dress watch, but it gets a bit groovy with a 19th-century silver-plating method most brands abandoned long ago. This is all so very German, as you would expect.

The case measures 36mm wide and 8.5mm thick, which puts it firmly in dress-watch territory. Sure, there might be no need to point that out, but it’s curious that Moritz Grossmann often makes quite large watches intended to be in the dress territory. So this is a bit of a relief. The stainless steel is entirely polished, with gently tapered lugs and a large flat crown. Sapphire crystals are found on top and bottom, and both reveal beautiful things underneath.

Starting with the dial, it does something quite unusual. First a brass base is engraved with Roman numerals, filled with turquoise lacquer and fired in a kiln. Then, the dial is silver-plated the surface by friction, an old technique that rubs a paste of silver powder, salt, cream of tartar and water into the metal by hand to leave a matte, grained finish. Very cool. The 1875 logo, the railway minute track, the small seconds and "Made in Germany" are all done in black. The hands are made in-house, ground with diamond files and flame-blued to a bright blue with razor-sharp tips.

Turn it over and you’ll see the manual-winding calibre 102.1, just 3.5mm thick, beating at 3Hz with a 48-hour power reserve. The German silver 3/5 plate has wide Glashütte ribbing with polished bevels, the balance cock is hand-engraved with a floral motif and a discreet "1826," and the movement uses white sapphires in solid gold chatons instead of synthetic rubies. Steel screws are heat-annealed to a violet-brown. The watch comes on a bluish-grey kudu leather strap with a steel prong buckle.

The new Moritz Grossmann Tefnut 36 Silver-plated By Friction Turquoise Blue is a limited edition of 12, priced at €29,000 without VAT. See more on the Moritz Grossmann website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• There’s nothing like walking into a pub and sitting down at an empty stool where your regular order awaits you. You have been seen; it’s a singular feeling of camaraderie and community. Club 2101, a dive bar in Oakland California, opens around 8 am each day. For The Oaklandside, Azucena Rasilla profiles a 16-hour-day in the life of the 80-year-old haunt, a story as colorful as the dedicated regulars who frequent the establishment, many of them captured in evocative photos by Sarahbeth Maney.

• Ahead of the 40th anniversary of Stand By Me, Alec Joyner takes up Rob Reiner’s classic film and considers it from a few dozen angles. It’s a canny piece of critical writing on time, memory, masculinity, and tenderness, forces that often work against each other. (Joyner doesn’t raise the subject of Reiner’s violent death last year, though he pauses briefly on Chris, a character “freakishly knifed to death . . . trying to break up a fight.”) Stand By Me‘s two days of summer are a “vital pause” in the life of its characters, a “portal . . . into the expanse of time.” Here, Joyner illuminates that pause, and captures some of its elusive grace.

• Stormy Morse lost two partners to gun suicide. She didn’t know that the second one, Lewis Tabler, had made the National Rifle Association the beneficiary of his retirement savings through its planned-giving program. In this feature, co-published with The New Yorker, Mike Spies describes what happens when the NRA, which has long denied a connection between access to guns and suicide rates, comes to collect.

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One video you have to watch today

Love a good Tiny Desk Concert, and this one is good. Also, Eve is a great person, I still remember her being incredibly kind to my wife. Good stuff.

---

Rethink the blueprint for customer financial support

See how Fin and Plaid are helping AI take action in financial services, while keeping businesses in control. Join us August 13th to explore faster onboarding, proactive support, and real-time issue resolution.

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Thanks for reading,
Vuk

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Today is a casual day on the watch front, so no groundbreaking messages from me.

Every headline satisfies an opinion. Except ours.

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In this issue

• Seiko Continues 145th Anniversary Celebration With Six Different Models All In Edo Purple

• The echo/neutra Averau 42 Ceramic Sand Collection Is A Modern 80s Inspired Classic

• Bangalore Watch Company Keeps Pushing The Pocket Watch Idea With The New Forty-Seven

• Corum's New Golden Book Hides a Hemingway Quote Under The Cover

👂What’s new

1/

Seiko Continues 145th Anniversary Celebration With Six Different Models All In Edo Purple

Seiko's turning 145, and they’ve been celebrating in all sorts of ways. This one, however, might be the strangest. The picked a color, Edo Purple, and slapped it on a handful of watches. Six of them, that don’t really have anything in common. There's a mechanical Alpinist, a GPS Astron, a solar chronograph, a Cocktail Time, a digital throwback, and an SKX. This just might be the best illustration, even if it’s just a sliver, of how diverse the Seiko catalogue is, ranging from a €450 automatic to a €3,000 satellite-synced titanium monster.

I have a feeling that the Prospex Alpinist HBC006 might be the most popular of the bunch. The stainless steel case measures 39.50mm wide and 12.70mm thick, with a sapphire crystal on top, and 200 meters of water resistance. The dial has the most interesting purple of the group, with a sunray brushed finish and a bit lighter than what you might imagine when you hear purple. The numerals, indices and hands are done in silver, with a hint of gold on the Seiko name. Inside is the automatic calibre 6R55 beating at 3Hz, with a 72-hour power reserve. The watch comes on a black alligator-embossed leather strap with purple stitching and a steel folding clasp. The HBC006 is limited 7,000 pieces, priced at €980. See more here.

The Astron GPS Solar Dual-Time HAB011 is the technical flagship, but perhaps the one that doesn’t exactly fit in with the purple theme, as the dial is a bit overshadowed by everything else going on here. And by everything else, I mostly mean the many capabilities of the calibre 5X83: GPS sync, world time across 38 zones, dual-time, a chronograph, a perpetual calendar good to 2100, all solar powered. The spec sheet is absurd. The titanium case is 43.30mm wide and 13.40mm thick, with a black ceramic bezel on top, and 100 meters of water resistance. The deep purple dial has horizontal grooves and gets gold details on the seconds hand and logo. The watch comes on a titanium bracelet with ceramic center links. The HAB011 is limited to 2,000 pieces and priced at a pretty significant €3,000. See more on the Seiko website.

The Prospex Speedtimer Solar Chronograph HBJ005 could be the sportiest of the bunch. The stainless steel case is 41.10mm wide and 13mm thick, with 100 meters of water resistance, and a black tachymeter bezel with purple details. The dial is even lighter than the Alpinist, with three black sub-dials, gold-tone indexes and central hands, and a date at 4:30. Inside is the solar calibre V192 that powers the chronograph, a power reserve indicator and the silly 24-hour display. The watch comes on a steel bracelet with a three-fold clasp. This is also limited, but now at 8,000 pieces, with a price tag of €790. See more here.

The Presage Cocktail Time GMT HCB006 continues the theme of being inspired by cocktails at Tokyo's Star Bar. This one is styled after the “Edo Murasaki,” an original cocktail with a distinctive purple hue created in collaboration with Hisashi Kishi, owner of Star Bar. The stainless steel case measures 40.50mm wide and 12.80mm thick, there’s a box-shaped Hardlex crystal on top, and water resistance is 50 meters. The purple on the dial is stunning, there’s a date aperture at 3 o’clock and gold is used on the Seiko logo and GMT hand. Inside is the automatic calibre 4R34, which has a 41 hours of power reserve and a caller style GMT function. The watch comes on a steel bracelet with a folding clasp. Limited to 6,000 pieces, the HCB006 is priced at €620. See it here.

The Seiko 5 Sports SKX HDB003 might have the loudest purple of the lot, and I might like it the most. The stainless steel case is 42.50mm wide and 13.90mm thick, with 100 meters of water resistance. The purple sunray dial pairs gold branding with silver hands and LumiBrite-filled indexes. Inside is the automatic calibre 4R36 with 41 hours of power reserve, and the watch comes on a steel bracelet. This watch is also limited, but in Seiko’s world limited means 9,999 pieces. Price is set at €450. See more here.

Last, we have the Rotocall HFL001, which might be the most interesting of the bunch to me. I love the revival of Seiko's 1982 multifunction digital watch. And while I don’t like black cased watches in general, I’m really digging this one. It measures 37mm wide and 10.60mm thick, with the rotating bezel serving as the interface for the digital functions done in black and purple. Water resistance is 100 meters, there’s gold printing on the LCD and inside is the quartz calibre A824 which has a calendar, alarm, and stopwatch. The watch comes on a black coated bracelet. Limited to 4,000 pieces, the watch is priced at €670. See more on the Seiko website.

2/

The echo/neutra Averau 42 Ceramic Sand Collection Is A Modern 80s Inspired Classic

Most recently, echo/neutra has been making waves with their rectangular dress watches. That’s how the majority of their current fans know them. But if you, like me, are the annoying type that knew a b(r)and before they were cool, then you know that echo/neutra makes some pretty dope sports and field watches. The Averau field collection in particular has been super interesting, and we’re now getting a new Ceramic Sand variant with a sand colored dial and a black case, like something that Porsche Design might have released in the 1980s, in two variants — a three hander and a chrongoraph.

Both cases pair a matte black ceramic shell with what echo/neutra calls TiFrame, an internal grade 2 titanium structure that holds the movement. Ceramic resists scratches and has a nice satin finish but tends to crack at the lugs under impact, so titanium reinforcement solves that weakness. The Automatic is 42mm wide, 10.5mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 51.5mm. The Chronograph has the same width and lug-to-lug but is a bit thicker at 14.6mm, as you would expect from a chronograph. Both watch get sapphire crystals and 100 meters of water resistance.

Both versions share the black case and both have a sand colored dial, which is such a good contrast against the case. On the Automatic, black applied baton markers and broad black hands leave the sand surface room to breathe, with a red tip on the seconds hand as the only color. The Chronograph is busier by nature but still pretty balanced. The sub-dials are charcoal colored and you get the same red on the central seconds.

Continuing the similarities, both variants have proven Sellita calibres in Elaboré grade, adjusted in three positions to a +/-7 to +/-20 seconds per day tolerance. The Automatic uses the SW200-1 beating at 4Hz with a 41-hour reserve, the industry's default workhorse. The Chronograph gets the SW510B, with the same 4Hz beat rate, but a longer 56-hour reserve and a traditional automatic chronograph layout. Both come on black textile straps with dark hardware.

The echo/neutra Averau 42 Ceramic Sand, is available now, priced at €970 for the three-hand Automatic, and €1,970 for the Chronograph. See more on the echo/neutra website.

3/

Bangalore Watch Company Keeps Pushing The Pocket Watch Idea With The New Forty-Seven

Bangalore Watch Company made a name for itself outside of India by making good looking, fairly affordable and well built watches that had one significant twist — they all paid homage to modern Indian culture. Whether it was watches themed after the various branches of the Indian military, their efforts in space exploration, or the national infatuation with cricket, their watches were uniquely Indian. Now, however, some will say they are jumping on to the pocket watch bandwagon, following in the footsteps of the Swatch collaboration with AP. However, watch development doesn’t work like that, as it takes months and months to develop, test and produce a watch, much longer than the AP x Swatch has been out. This is more Bangalore Watch Company grasping at the zeitgeist, while keeping with the India theme. Only this is not modern India. With the Forty-Seven BWC goes back to the mid-century years when the country was still struggling with brutal colonialism and its effects, poor, in debt, with few things holding it together. At the time, India had few things that led it to a brighter future, and the rail system was one of them. A rail system run on, among other things, pocket watches. You’re getting it now, right?

The case is 46mm wide and 12mm thick, made out of 316L steel finished in rose gold PVD. That's a large object by wristwatch standards and a normal one for a pocket watch. A K1 hardened mineral crystal covers the dial, water resistance is 30 meters, and the crown on the right side of the case is a push-pull design stamped with the BWC logo. The caseback is closed and can be engraved to order, which is just perfectly nostalgic. At 12 o’clock is a large and slightly dramatic buckle, for a bit of flourish.

The dial is off-white with a linen texture, a reference to something much more important than it might appear at first glance. The texture is a reference to the Swadeshi movement, the push to boycott British-made goods and produce domestically that ran through the independence struggle and carried into the early republic. Khadi, the hand-spun, handwoven cotton cloth, was the physical symbol of that idea, and Gandhi's spinning wheel became its emblem for a reason: cloth you made yourself was economic independence you could rely on. At 6 o’clock is a small seconds display. Overall, the dial has a vintage look with old-radium tone of Super-LumiNova on cathedral style hands. It’s a good look.

Inside is a Swiss Ronda 6004.D quartz movement with roughly 40 months of battery life. Quartz is a peculiar choice for a pocket watch, but I can’t say that I mind it in modern context. A pocket watch will most likely not be a daily carry, so making sure it’s always running and accurate is a good thing. It comes on a lanyard-style strap in oil-pulled leather with a matching rose gold clip.

The Bangalore Watch Company Forty-Seven is available for pre-order right now, with deliveries starting October 15. Price is set at about €1,090. See more on the BWC website.

4/

Corum's New Golden Book Hides a Hemingway Quote Under The Cover

For some unfortunate reason, Corum watches were extremely popular where I live back in the late 90s and early 00s. I say unfortunate, because they were popular among the exact crowd that can kill a reputation of a watch brand. For that reason, every time I see a Corum, I cringe. But I’ve been fighting this urge over the past few months, ever since Corum got a kind of soft relaunch. I’ll come back with more details on that, but in the meantime, this is Corum bringing back something I didn’t know about the old Corum and that I would have loved. This is the new Golden Book, a recreation of a watch Corum has been making since 1996, and it’s exactly what it says on the tin — a book that sits on your wrist, with a hinged cover to reveal the dial. It’s a very fun thing and I love it.

If you don’t love it just yet, just listen to the dimensions of the case — 29mm wide, 36mm long, and a pretty incredible 7.6mm thick. You see, this isn’t a chunky book, it’s a delicate miniature. The case is made out of grade 5 titanium and it’s covered in 18K 5N rose gold. The hinged cover hides the majority of the dial, but also has a cutout in the center so you can glance at the time without opening the cover. The most interesting stat, I’ll have to say, is the water resistance. This thing is resistant to 30 meters. Pretty wild.

Under the cover, the dial is white lacquered brass, glossy and plain. Plain, except for the quote written in as if it was a page in a real book, attributed to Ernest Hemingway: “Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what you have.” Black baton hands for the hours and minutes, and that's all.

The movement is the hand-wound Calibre CO157, 17 jewels, running at 21,600 vph with a 46-hour reserve. The strap is black vulcanised rubber with a leather-textured finish, 22mm at the lugs down to 18mm at the rose gold buckle.

The new Corum Golden Book doesn’t seem to be a limited edition and it’s priced at CHF 28,000. See more on the Corum website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• Midway through Boyce Upholt’s mind-boggling dispatch, one of his sources sums up the central challenge of the Gulf Coast canid: “Why is there not just a simple explanation for what this thing is?” The “wolfy coyotes” of southeastern Texas hold genetic traces that may link them to red wolves, which were declared extinct in the wild in 1980. But a lack of data makes it challenging to define the species—or, for that matter, to determine whether a private company has cloned the red wolf or something else entirely. Upholt doesn’t deal in simple explanations; the pleasure, here, is in the complexity.

• You don’t have to live in El Cerrito, California, or have ever used Nextdoor, for this essay to resonate. For Oakland Review of Books, Amy Brown recounts buying her first home in the East Bay city and swiftly becoming the villain of her local Nextdoor—after her uncharitable Bluesky posts about the seniors opposing a library tax made their way back to her neighbors. Honest and funny, Brown’s essay explores being locally online—that weird, often uncomfortable place between online and IRL—and shows how (not) to talk to people you’ll run into at the grocery store.

• When Saeed Jones gets a Lyft ride with Mister Anthony in New Orleans, he has no idea he’s in for brief but deep connection that will occupy his mind long after the trip is over. Anthony is a Black elder originally from Mississippi, “old enough to be retired but still taking gigs.” As the man recalls the racism he experienced in the Magnolia State, Jones is reminded of his own experiences, his own trepidation. In all his travels, Jones reveals that Mississippi is the only place he has ever felt scared for his safety as a Black man.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

I had no idea that Regular Car Reviews, my favorite sardonic car review channel, also did documentaries. And boy, what a surprise it was!

Thanks for reading,
Vuk

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. We’re starting to scrape the bottom of the release well, so you might start seeing some skipped issues, but I’ve seen some stuff coming out in September and that will be a really good month.

Smart starts here.

You don't have to read everything — just the right thing. 1440's daily newsletter distills the day's biggest stories from 100+ sources into one quick, 5-minute read. It's the fastest way to stay sharp, sound informed, and actually understand what's happening in the world. Join 4.5 million readers who start their day the smart way.

Join for free today!

In this issue

• TAG Heuer Says Goodbye to The Dutch Grand Prix With Full Orange Formula 1 Solargraph

• Timex Reimagines the '80s Digital Sport Watch With the Retroware

• Jacques Bianchi Reinterprets Its Marseille Tide Gauge With An Enamel Dial

• Cartier Updates Their Skinny Watch With The Tank Américaine Squelette & Tank Américaine Art Déco

👂What’s new

1/

TAG Heuer Says Goodbye to The Dutch Grand Prix With Full Orange Formula 1 Solargraph

While it holds immense importance in the history of racing, over the last few years, the Dutch track of Zandvoort has become even more important than before. If you’ve seen it over the past few seasons, you would have seen that the stands don't just hold fans of the local boy Max Verstappen, but rather a solid wall of orange that moves as one. So, it’s quite sad to hear that on August 23rd that circuit hosts its last Formula 1 weekend. At least for now. But to say goodby, TAG Heuer is paying homage to the track with a fully orange Formula 1 Solargraph, very similar to the orange Formula 1 in the 1990s.

The case is 38mm wide and 9.9mm thick, made out of sand-blasted stainless steel, with a lug-to-lug of 45.2mm and with 100 meters of water resistance. The bezel is made out TAG Heuer's bio-polyamide resin in an extremely loud orange, paired with white text for the 60 minute scale. The caseback has a checkered engraving and the TAG Heuer logo.

The dial is opaline gray with orange and red printing and red lacquered hands, a near-copy of the 1990s original down to the color split. The markers are applied now rather than printed, and the old "Professional 200 Meters Quartz" text has given way to "Formula 1 Solargraph Swiss Made." The orange minute track and bezel are fantastic contrasts to the grey dial.

Inside is the TH50-00, a solar quartz movement from La Joux-Perret that charges through the dial. One minute of light buys a day of run time; a full charge takes 40 hours and lasts about ten months. The strap version comes on matching orange rubber, but you can also get it on a three-row steel bracelet, sold online only.

The new TAG Heuer Formula 1 Zandvoort Limited Edition is available now, limited to 1,500 on strap and priced at €2,100, while the steel bracelet is limited to 1,000 and priced at €2,200. See more on the TAG Heuer website.

2/

Timex Reimagines the '80s Digital Sport Watch With the Retroware

Timex occupies a specific role in this world we inhabit: the palate cleanser you reach for when the six-figure releases start blurring together. The new Retroware Digital is the perfect example of that. It isn't a reissue, which sets it apart from the brand's Q Timex and T80 revivals, both of which faithfully recreate watches that actually existed. This one is a fresh reference that borrows the swagger of mid-'80s digital sport watches without copying any single model.

The case is 46mm wide, made out of blue or grey resin, which keeps it featherlight and easier to wear. The integrated strap and virtual lack of lugs also help a lot with that 46mm not feeling too large. Water resistance is rated to 50 meters.

The display is where things get very groovy. Oversized curved numerals dominate the readout, almost like a 1985 designer's guess at what the future would look like. It's an odd, appealing place for a new watch to live. Functionally it does the expected digital work: chronograph, alarm, timer, and a full calendar. The Indiglo backlight returns, one of the pleasures of owning a Timex after dark.

Power comes from a battery-driven quartz module, unnamed as is often the case with Timex. Both versions ship on color-matched resin straps, one blue and one grey-green, fitted with quick-release spring bars you can swap without tools.

The Timex Retroware Digital is available now, priced at €139. See more on the Timex website.

3/

Jacques Bianchi Reinterprets Its Marseille Tide Gauge With An Enamel Dial

A marégraphe, or a tide gauge, does exactly what it says on the label — it gauges the hight of a tide. While they are now mostly sensor based, for centuries these devices were simple floats and sticks. And often, they were housed in dedicated buildings to eliminate as much environmental impact as possible. One such building is the Marégraphe de Marseille, a truly iconic building not just for Marseille, but all of France. Built in 1883, this structure was used to determine the origin of altitudes in mainland France, marking the fundamental reference point for the French leveling network. A year ago, the very charming French brand Jacques Bianchi partnered up with the Marégraphe de Marseille to release a watch, the brand's first non-destro diver. The Marégraphe II reverses that decision, returning the crown to the left side of the case, while adding one of the prettiest enamel dials I’ve ever seen.

The case is steel, 42mm wide, with 20mm lugs. While the case is still quite curvy, the lines appear tauter than the original, the chamfers more defined, and the bezel now has a slight bevel. The crown moves back to the left side of the case, so this is a destro built for the right wrist. The caseback is engraved "Marégraphe de Marseille." Water resistance is 200 meters.

The dial is the showstopper here. It is built from 20 layers of enamel, translucent enough to show a wave pattern underneath, all done in a dark blue, almost black at some points. It looks fantastic. The indices are individually machined and applied, a first for the brand. Hands are lumed.

Inside is the Swiss-made Soprod P024 automatic, an hours, minutes, seconds and date movement regulated to run within -4/+6 seconds per day. It comes on an FKM rubber strap with a second parachute-style strap included.

The Marégraphe II is limited to 300 numbered pieces, each numbered on the caseback. Price is set at €1,395. See more on the Jacques Bianchi website.

4/

Cartier Updates Their Skinny Watch With The Tank Américaine Squelette & Tank Américaine Art Déco

The Américaine is the tall, stretched cousin in the Tank family, and while it just might be my impression, I don’t think it has the fan base it should have. While people go crazy over the Tank, I’ve always thought the Américaine was a much more impressive watch. If for nothing, than for its quirkiness. And the two models that Cartier recently released, the Tank Américaine Squelette & Tank Américaine Art Déco show exactly how quirky it can get.

Both share a case measuring 44.4mm by 24.4mm and 8.24mm thick, with sapphire crystals front and back and 30 meters of water resistance. The Skeleton can be had in either platinum or in rose gold; while the Art Deco is platinum only, both with a satin finish and an octagonal crown set with a faceted ruby.

The Skeleton puts the hand-wound 1988 MC calibre on full display, its bridges shaped almost like Roman numerals arcing along the curved profile of the case. It’s a very dramatic case and depending on the case material the internal chapter ring that holds the minute markers comes in either silver or gold. The Art Deco fully embraces its name. A vertical grid runs toward a central vanishing point, with a burgundy gradient color that looks so classy, especially with sunray brushing, opaline and satin finishes.

The Skeleton's 1988 MC is hand-wound; the Art Deco's 1899 MC is automatic, named for the year Cartier settled into 13 rue de la Paix. Both beat at 21,600 vph, with some forty hours of power reserve. Both watches come with alligator leather straps that have quick release spring bars and matching material buckles.

The Tank Américaine Skeleton is priced at €55,000, the Art Deco at €27,900, both available now. See more on the Cartier website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• There is no better thing to write about than something as unusual as a dog surfing competition. In the hands of a decent question-asker and a better writer, what looks like one of those stereotypical local news call-ins becomes an incredibly tense piece of politics and intrigue.

• After her son disappeared, Isabel Miranda de Wallace swore she would bring the culprits to justice. She became a national hero. But did she go too far?

• For decades, workers at a nuclear facility in Kentucky were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation. Management assured them nothing was wrong. Then four friends risked everything to reveal the truth.

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One video you have to watch today

Do I just keep spamming you with Speeed videos until you all subscribe? I think so.

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Thanks for reading,
Vuk

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. I’m done with this week, so no smart words from me today.

Smart starts here.

You don't have to read everything — just the right thing. 1440's daily newsletter distills the day's biggest stories from 100+ sources into one quick, 5-minute read. It's the fastest way to stay sharp, sound informed, and actually understand what's happening in the world. Join 4.5 million readers who start their day the smart way.

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In this issue

• Yema Brings The Superman Bronze CMM.10 Back With Three New Glossy Gilt Dials

• Seiko Adds Two Sunset-Themed Prospex Divers to Its Asia-Pacific Limited Edition Run

• UNIMATIC Toughens the Modello Uno With a MIL-STD-Tested Dive Build

• Singer Reimagined Restores the Valjoux 72 for the Heritage V72 Chronograph

👂What’s new

1/

Yema Brings The Superman Bronze CMM.10 Back With Three New Glossy Gilt Dials

The Yema Superman has been the brand’s flagship diver since the late 1960s and has covered a lot of ground since then — titanium cases, manufacture movements, even a tourbillon version, all developed at Yema’s own workshops in Morteau in the French Jura. But one of my favorites has always been the Superman Bronze. It’s been around for a while, but now it comes back with three new glossy lacquered dials and it’s a good look.

The bronze case measures 39mm wide and 10.95mm thick, with a 48mm lug-to-lug. Surfaces alternate between vertical brushing and polished chamfers, and the bronze unidirectional bezel is radially brushed to set it apart from the case grain. You get a screw-down crown with the embossed logo, Yema's bezel lock, a 2.2mm thick double-domed sapphire crystal, and 300 meters of water resistance. The bronze will patina with wear, which will only make it look cooler.

The dials are the novelty for this watch, and it’s an interesting contrast to the bronze. There are three colors to choose from — white, green and brown — all done in glossy lacquer, with applied gilt logos and raised hour markers, plus gilt-coated diamond-cut hands filled with Grade A Super-LumiNova that glows green.

Inside is the CMM.10, Yema's manufacture calibre developed, assembled, and regulated in Morteau. It beats at 4Hz, with a 70-hour power reserve from a large single barrel, and Yema rates it at -3/+5 seconds per day with plenty of shock and magnetic resistance. Each watch comes on an integrated FKM Tropic-style rubber strap matched to the dial, closed with a brushed bronze pin buckle.

The new Yema Superman Bronze trio is available now, limited to 1,948 numbered pieces across all three dials, priced at €1,890. See more on the Yema website.

2/

Seiko Adds Two Sunset-Themed Prospex Divers to Its Asia-Pacific Limited Edition Run

I both love and hate Seiko’s regional limited edition. I love them because they’re usually a much cooler version of a watch available anywhere else. I hate them because they are usually very hard to get. Their latest such release are the Prospex HBB003K and HBB004K, Asia-Pacific exclusive (Japan excepted) Samurai models. While not groundbreaking, they come just as I’m toying with the idea of getting a Samurai. And that yellow one just might be the on.

The case measures 41.7mm wide, 12.3mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 49.5mm. That's a familiar modern-Seiko footprint. Departing from classic Seiko is the Samurai case which has sharp angles and facets that give it a dynamic look. The crystal is Hardlex rather than sapphire. Seiko is pretending that this is somehow a good tradeoff between acrylic and sapphire, but it’s not. A screw-down crown and solid caseback give you 200 meters of water resistance.

The sand-textured dials are really nice. The HBB003K goes bright yellow for peak golden hour; the HBB004K pushes later into a saturated orange. The broad hands and applied markers have a heavy dose of Lumibrite, and the date sits between four and five o'clock in a tiny round aperture. Seiko usually uses this aperture to integrate the date very well, but here the date wheels are white, clashing with the dials.

Inside is the Calibre 4R35, Seiko's automatic workhorse running at 3Hz with a 41-hour power reserve. Nobody buys a 4R35 for its numbers, but it will run for years and pretty much everyone can service it. The steel bracelet has brushed and polished surfaces, a 20mm lug width, and a three-fold clasp with push-button release and expansion to clear a wetsuit.

Both are available for pre-order now, but only in the Asia-Pacific region. Price should be somewehere in the A$995 range, which translates to about €600. See more on the Seiko Australia website here and here.

3/

UNIMATIC Toughens the Modello Uno With a MIL-STD-Tested Dive Build

Unimatic keeps finding new things to do with the same case and I respect them for it. Their latest such feat is the Modello Uno UT1-PD, obviously a diver built on the Modello Uno case, but here a dive watch built to survive being dropped. Really hard. So hard it passes the MIL-STD-810H impact testing, and they do it, you guessed it, by using a quartz movement that’s very well protected. This is also part of their Toolwatch collection, recognizable by little pops of orange.

The case is the familiar Modello Uno case, made out of sandblasted 316L stainless steel, 40mm wide on its own or 41.5mm across the bezel, with a lug-to-lug of 49mm. It measures 13.3mm thick without the crystal and 13.6mm with it, which is chunky but expected for 300 meters of water resistance. Sure, you would expect a thinner quartz watch, but here the movement is wrapped in a shock absorbing protector which takes up thickness. The construction is tested to MIL-STD-810H, a U.S. military testing standard that subjects equipment to environmental and mechanical stresses like shock, vibration, temperature extremes, and moisture to verify it can survive rough field conditions. Sure, marketing speak, but if it works, it works.

The dial is matte black with printed Arabic numerals, a white open seconds rail, and international orange trims. Matte black ladder hands show the hours and minutes, while a reverse lollipop seconds hand with an orange tip tracks the running seconds. Super-LumiNova C1 is used on the hands.

Inside is the Seiko VH31A, a quartz movement with a sweeping seconds hand rather than the usual tick, accurate to ±15 seconds per month with roughly two years of battery. It sits inside UNIMATIC's 360-degree protection system. The watch comes on a black TPU two-piece strap with brushed stainless steel hardware, and the whole thing weighs 99 grams strapped up.

The Modello Uno UT1-PD is a limited edition of 250, individually numbered, available August 7th starting at 5PM CET. Price is set at €525, but that’s without VAT. See more on the Unimatic website.

4/

Singer Reimagined Restores the Valjoux 72 for the Heritage V72 Chronograph

OK, this is a bit of a complicated one, I hope I can make sense of it. Singer Vehicle Design was started in 2009 by Rob Dickinson, former singer of Catherine Wheel and cousin of Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson. They started by restoring Porsche 911 cars to absolute perfection, essentially dominating references to the word “restomod”. They evolved from restoring these old cars to creating their own modern variants of old Porsches, with completely custom made frames and engines. These are insane projects starting at a million dollars to build, but also the pinnacle of restoration. Dickinson also started Singer Reimagined with designer Marco Borraccino, a watch company. They kind of did the exact opposite path to that of SVD. They started by making some uniquely modern watches with brand new developed movements from partners, only to make their way to the Heritage collection which meticulously restores iconic vintage movements to put them into their fantastic looking watches. Last year, we saw the Heritage Chronograph use new-old-stock Valjoux 236 movements. Now, we’re getting the Heritage V72 which takes pristine new-old-stock Valjoux 72 movements, one of the great manual-wind column-wheel chronograph calibres, and rebuilds them to a finishing standard that is pretty much unprecedented.

The case is 38.8mm wide and 13.25mm thick, available in either stainless steel or 18k yellow gold. Singer gives it a sunray satin finish with polished bevels, vintage piston-style pushers, and a flat fluted crown, with glassbox sapphire crystals front and back. Water resistance is 50 meters, which is fine for a dress chronograph that you likely won’t be diving with.

Two dials colors are available, one for each case material: a stone-grey matte on the steel, velvety matte black on the gold. Both have the very cool toothed golden flange from the Caballero and lay out the classic Valjoux 72 tricompax registers, champagne snailed sub-dials for the 30-minute counter at 3, the 12-hour totaliser at 6, and running seconds at 9. Faceted golden markers, openworked sword hands with orange lume, and Singer's signature orange central chronograph hand tie everything together. It's handsome and restrained.

It’s all restrained until you flip the watch over and see that wild, wild chronograph movement. The calibre, now designated SG7201, keeps the Valjoux 72's original 2.5Hz beat rade and 44-hour power reserve, but everything cosmetic has been redone: frosted bridges, hand-polished chamfers and screws, rhodium-plated steel, and a blue ALD-treated switch component. The Y-shaped chronograph bridge has a "Restored by Singer" inscription. The gold model comes on a 20mm black grained leather strap tapering to 16mm; the steel gets a grey textile strap of the same dimensions.

The steel Heritage V72 is limited to 50 pieces at CHF 23,000 without tax, while the gold is limited to 20 pieces at CHF 45,000, also without tax, both delivering early November 2026. See more on the Singer Reimagined website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• Vice, both the magazine and the subsequent media house, has been a bit of an obsession of mine. I’ve studied their rise and fall from grace with great interest and I’ve loved hearing all the inside stories. Mitchell Jackson, a wild character in his own right, writes down his memories of the failure of Vice. He claims the company didn't die because of investors, sexual harassment charges, or going 'woke' — it died because the founder stopped believing in the product that made them famous. Great story, made even better with memories that include stuff like this: “Aaron Carter, high on meth, threatening to kill me”, and “Aaron Carter, again high on meth, FaceTiming me about Los Angeles County towing his car” and certainly “Shane Smith ordering a German executive to lock the staff in an attic so we would no longer write about bestiality because it offended Gloria Steinem and the CEO of Google when Shane sailed with them on a yacht.” There’s a bunch more here. 

• Forced disappearances have plagued Mexico for decades. In 2019, something remarkable happened: Twenty-one disappeared people were found, alive. They had been toiling in narco-slavery camps, an under-covered aspect of Mexico’s illicit drug trade. But there wasn’t a happy ending.

• In this harrowing, incredibly reported story co-published by Science and Retraction Watch, Brendan Borrell uncovers how “Mei,” a 6-year-old girl in China, died a week after an experimental gene-editing trial went wrong—and how her medical team, led by neuroscientist Zilong Qiu, downplayed the risks to her parents, did not publicly disclose her death, and has faced no real accountability.

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One video you have to watch today

Yo… this is either the best edited trailer of all time, or this will be the best movie of the year. How in the hell can a movie about the TV show To Catch A Predator (btw, I will forever think of this as one of the greatest TV show names in history) look this good? Also, do you remember when Robert Pattinson played a sparkly vampire in Twilight? Yeah, neither do I, because this man is on a generational run of acting.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. August is a month that the vast majority of the watch industry takes off, so there aren’t a lot of releases going around. I still do my best to come up with at least four a day and it’s looking good so far. However… The one brand that doesn’t care about summer vacations seems to be Seiko and I’m sitting on a boatload of Seiko releases. I’m trying to spread them out as much as possible, but don’t hate me if you notice a lot of Seiko popping up on an almost daily basis.

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In this issue

• Seiko and Honda Honor The Most Absurd Scooter Of All Time With A Yellow Field Watch

• Favre Leuba Adds Two-Tone Steel And Gold To The Deep Raider Day Date Collection

• The Grøne Oldenzaal Horologium Brings The Grönefeld Brothers Touch To A Dressier Watch

• Audemars Piguet Introduces Their Flying Tourbillon To The Bleu Nuit Ceramic Collection

👂What’s new

1/

Seiko and Honda Honor The Most Absurd Scooter Of All Time With A Yellow Field Watch

The Honda Motocompo was 42 kilograms of two-stroke urban absurdity: a folding 1981 scooter designed to collapse into the trunk of a Honda City and unfold wherever you parked. It was never fast or advanced, let alone appreciated and widely used, but it has aged into a design icon. It’s also the very last motorcycle that I would expect that would get a tribute watch. But Seiko has a great relationship with Honda, having done tribute watches to several of their cars, so it isn’t that much of a surprise. Honda is marking the Motocompo's 45th anniversary and Seiko is celebrating it with the HDB010.

The case is very familiar, with dimensions you can’t exactly hate: 36.4mm wide, 12.5mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 44.4mm in steel. A matte black hard coating covers it, and the crown reads "TURN" on its side, borrowed from the scooter's fuel cock. A curved Hardlex crystal sits up front, and a red tinted mineral glass with the Honda logo and an illustration of the Motocompo on the back. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The dial has a matte yellow base, embossed black Arabic numerals, Lumibrite markers, and a black horizontal bar across the center with the Honda logo, mimicking the iconic protective bars on the bike. The Automatic script uses Motocompo's typeface, and the day-date discs are blacked out to match.

Inside is the calibre 4R36, Seiko's workhorse automatic running at 3Hz with a 41-hour power reserve. The black nylon strap continues the joke: the keepers read "Carrying Point" and the tip reads "Insertion Point," both references to how the scooter strapped into a car.

The new HDB010 goes on sale worldwide in September 2026 in a box shaped like the Motocompo's shipping carton, limited to 8,000 pieces. Only the UK price has been confirmed, but it converts to about €400. See more on the Seiko website.

2/

Favre Leuba Adds Two-Tone Steel And Gold To The Deep Raider Day Date Collection

While I might have had a bit of doubt, there’s no denying that the revival of the Favre Leuba brand under Patrik Hoffmann in 2024 has been somewhat of a success. While we don’t know what their sales are like, they have had a pretty consistent release schedule over the last two years, and it’s great to see it. Now, following the all steel models, we’re getting a two-tone take on the Deep Raider Day Date in steel with yellow gold PVD accents.

The case is 40mm wide and 12.5mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 48.2mm. Surfaces are mostly vertical brushing with a polished bevel running along the mid-case, and the gold PVD is used on the fluted part of the unidirectional bezel, the crown, and the central bracelet link. The ceramic bezel insert is color-matched to the dial with golden numerals. A double-domed sapphire crystal with AR coating sits up top, and both the crown and caseback screw down. Water resistance is 300 meters.

Three dials are available: blue and green with a sunray-brushed gradient, plus a solid black. The central hands and the hourglass logo at 6 o'clock get the same yellow gold PVD treatment. All three use a sandwich construction, with Super-LumiNova glowing up through the elongated recessed indices. A rectangular day-date window sits at 3 o'clock with white discs outlined in white, and you can switch the display between English and German.

The automatic calibre FLD05 is essentially a Sellita SW220-1 beating at 4Hz, with a fairly modest-for-the-time 38 hours of power reserve. The integrated three-link bracelet has the gold PVD on its central link and closes with a butterfly clasp.

The Deep Raider Day Date two-tone editions are available now, priced at CHF 2,100. See more on the Favre Leuba website.

3/

The Grøne Oldenzaal Horologium Brings The Grönefeld Brothers Touch To A Dressier Watch

You know the Grönefeld brothers by now: Tim and Bart, the Dutch duo behind some of the most lavishly finished independent watches money can buy. Grøne Oldenzaal is their more accessible brand, launched in 2024. Following the Manueel One and the Moment Meter Chronograph, which were kind of sporty models, we’re now getting the Horologium. Interestingly, this new hand-wound, quirky and dressy watch looks a LOT like the 1941 Principia, a model that the brothers make under their grown up Grönefeld brand, that sells for mid five figures. Kind of a risky move, to offer such a similar watch with off-the-shelf internals and a much lower price, but I won’t be complaining much about it. You’ll have to ask 1941 Principia models how they feel about it.

The case is 39mm wide and 10mm thick in stainless steel, with the signature Grönefeld vocabulary translated to the lower-tier brand: polished concave bezel, brushed flanks, downward-curving stepped lugs, and a conical crown. Front and back sapphire crystals sit on orange gaskets, a small Dutch flourish you'll notice every now and again. Water resistance is 50 meters. This is dressier and more comfortable than the Manueel One, and the proportions are close to ideal for the style.

Two dials are available, each giving you a completely different vibe for the watch. Which is cool, because one’s more traditional, while the other gives you a lot of expression through the dial. Even the brothers call it that. The Quirky, as the model is called, has a vivid Dutch orange center with baby blue accents, right up to a baby blue strap with orange stitching. The Classic is a sunray-brushed salmon with silver-toned accents and is the one I'd wear. Both use heat-blued hands and diamond-cut, high-polished applied markers, and both swap the Manueel One's central seconds for a small seconds on a raised, diamond-cut plateau finished in circular brushing and sandblasting.

The movement is a hand-wound take on the La Joux-Perret G100, an architecture normally seen in automatic form, now visible through a display back. It beats at 4Hz with 60 hours of power reserve. It’s nicely decorated as well, with Geneva stripes, diamond-cut bevels, and blued screws. Straps are leather with contrasting stitching, baby blue on the Quirky and brown on the Classic, on a steel pin buckle.

The new Grøne Oldenzaal Horologium is limited to 188 per variant, priced at €2,390 without VAT. Orders open 13 August 2026 at 3PM CET, with deliveries starting mid-September. See more on the Grøne website.

4/

Audemars Piguet Introduces Their Flying Tourbillon To The Bleu Nuit Ceramic Collection

It feels like the Bleu Nuit collection, in which Audemars Piguet renders its iconic Royal Oak variants in beautiful blue ceramic, has been around forever. But they’ve only been doing it since last year. It has a timeless look, making it feel like it’s much older of a collection, but it also means that they can run through a bunch of models before it gets very boring. For their latest Bleu Neuit, AP is releasing the Selfwinding Flying Tourbillon in the deep blue Stern Frères developed for the earliest Royal Oak Jumbo dials, made by adding black pigment No. 50 to the lacquer.

The case is 41mm wide and 10.6mm thick, with 50 meters of water resistance. Every surface, including the integrated bracelet, is ceramic in the same Bleu Nuit shade, which makes the alternating satin-brushed and polished finishing the thing that gives it an interesting look. And hand-finishing ceramic to keep the Royal Oak's sharp facets crisp is very difficult. You get a sapphire crystal on top, while the caseback crystal is set in a titanium frame.

The dial continues the monochrome idea to its conclusion: a matching Bleu Nuit Grande Tapisserie with white gold applied markers and lume-filled Royal Oak hands. At 6 o'clock the rhodium-toned flying tourbillon sits under the dial with no visible upper bridge, so it looks kind of magical.

Inside is the in-house calibre 2950, the automatic flying tourbillon that debuted in the Code 11.59 before moving to the Royal Oak. It beats at 3Hz with a 65-hour power reserve. The sapphire caseback shows the movement which is decorated with Côtes de Genève, circular graining, polished bevels and a rhodium-toned 22-carat pink gold rotor. The bracelet is made out of the same perfect blue ceramic, closed with a titanium clasp.

The Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Selfwinding Flying Tourbillon Bleu Nuit is part of the permanent collection with price available on request. I’ve seen about CHF 200,000 reported. See more on the AP website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• For China Books Review, Zhang Er reflects on growing up in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, and how she owes her love of reading to Auntie Zou, a librarian who stripped banned books of their covers and any pages marked with the library seal of the Workers’ Club, smuggled them home, and secretly loaned them to her. Even amid the chaos of that era, Er remembers this part of her childhood as magical, a time “where characters sprung from their pages and interwove with each other’s lives,” and she imagined worlds far beyond the one she lived in.

• Ready to test your knowledge of hue, value, and saturation? Rivka Galchen’s latest for The New Yorker is a trove of fascinating details about our understanding of color. Galchen opens with the buzziest tidbit: an experiment conducted by a vision scientist who used a laser to stimulate a selection of his own cone cells and glimpse a color unknown outside of his laboratory. From there, she roams—through philosophy and art history, from studios to pigment shops—complicating our understanding of perception with each new turn of her titular question — What Would It Mean to See a New Color?

• When Jessica Black was 16 years old, she told a story to North Carolina police detectives that helped convict five friends of murder. Decades later, she’s still trying to correct the record. Matthew Bremner’s feature for Financial Times is a brisk tick-tock of efforts by Black and her incarcerated friends to overturn criminal convictions they claim were built on disturbing intimidation tactics.

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One video you have to watch today

Have you seen videos from the Craighill company on Instagram? Those dudes that take everyday objects and supposedly upgrade them. I’ve been flooded by the videos. And at first, they’re cool. But the more you think about what they are doing, the more ridiculous it seems. As is perfectly said in this video I’ve attached here.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. How cool is that ZRC? I’m not sure I would ever wear one, but how cool is it?!

Smart starts here.

You don't have to read everything — just the right thing. 1440's daily newsletter distills the day's biggest stories from 100+ sources into one quick, 5-minute read. It's the fastest way to stay sharp, sound informed, and actually understand what's happening in the world. Join 4.5 million readers who start their day the smart way.

Join for free today!

In this issue

• Omega Very Subtly Updates One Of Their Best Looking Watches, The Moonshine Gold And Green Speedmaster

• This Casio Gravitymaster Solves a Problem You Didn't Know Your Analog Watch Had

• ZRC Refreshes Their Very Unusual Grands Fonds MN64 in Titanium

• Panerai Wraps The Basic Luminor Marina PAM01707 In Very Cool Carbotech

👂What’s new

1/

Omega Very Subtly Updates One Of Their Best Looking Watches, The Moonshine Gold And Green Speedmaster

Omega has a habit of releasing a watch and then, a while later, releasing the same watch with one thing changed. And then they don’t tell anyone they updated the watch This is exactly what’s happening here. The green-dial gold Speedmaster already existed, and it was one of the best looking Speedmasters you could get; now it exists with gold sub-dials instead of green ones. A small change, but look at how cool those sub-dials are.

The case is exactly the same as the previous version, which means 42mm wide and 13.18mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 47.46mm, all of it in Omega's Moonshine Gold, the brand's own yellow gold alloy tuned to resist fading. A domed sapphire crystal sits up front and a sapphire caseback shows the movement. Water resistance is 50 meters, which is fine for what this is. I’d be more concerned about a hunk of gold on your wrist dragging you to the bottom of the pool.

The dial is green with a sunburst finish and a deep, deep green color, applied gold markers, applied Omega logo, and familiar gold hands. The bezel is polished green ceramic with a Ceragold tachymeter scale and the dot over 90. The change is the three sub-dials, now finished in Moonshine Gold rather than matching the dial and Omega has textured them with an azurage pattern it says was inspired by the spikes on golf shoes. Make of that what you will.

Inside is the Co-Axial Master Chronometer calibre 3861, hand-wound, METAS-certified, beating at 3Hz with roughly 50 hours of power reserve. It's the same movement that powers the rest of the current Moonwatch line so you know it’s good. The bracelet is Moonshine Gold with a folding clasp.

The Speedmaster Moonwatch Professional in Moonshine Gold (Ref. 310.60.42.50.10.002) is available now, priced at €51,600. See more on the Omega website.

2/

This Casio Gravitymaster Solves a Problem You Didn't Know Your Analog Watch Had

While reading about the new Casio G-Shock GRAVITYMASTER GWR-B3000, I learned that every analog (quartz) watch has a built in flaw. I mean, the flaw is obvious, I just never thought about it before. Motor-driven hands can slip off their reference points after a hard knock, leaving the watch to show the wrong time while its internal clock keeps perfect time underneath. Casio has spent years fighting this with correction routines that run on a fixed schedule, realigning the hands every so often whether or not the watch was ever hit. The new Gravitymaster takes a more proactive role. It watches for the impact itself and snaps the hands back the moment they move.

The snapping of the hands is cool, but don’t sleep on this case. Casio calls it a dual hollow structure: a carbon fiber-reinforced inner case sits inside an outer shell of stainless steel protectors formed by metal injection molding, with visible resin shock absorbers between the two layers. The center case is held at four points and looks like it floats, a shape Casio arrived at through topology optimization and stress simulation. At 56.7mm by 47.3mm it’s enormous, but at 102 grams it should wear super light. Sapphire crystal on top, 200 meters of water resistance, and a bezel swaps the usual G-Shock logo for engraved world-time city codes.

The GWR-B3000 comes in two dials, one blue and one grey, and both are low-reflection and built for reading rather than admiring. The layout is the same across both: an in-dial solar cell, a flight log, and the dual-time UTC display.

Inside is the second-generation Tough Movement, the Tough MVT.2. It adds two functions aimed straight at hand drift. Auto hand home position correction now pairs with shock detection, so a strong impact triggers immediate realignment instead of waiting for the next scheduled check. A magnetic field sensor deals with the other common culprit, pausing the hands when it detects a strong field and returning them once you’re clear of it. How cool is that?

Through the Smartphone Link app you get automatic time adjustment four times a day, simplified setting, and world time reaching roughly 300 cities plus any other location you care to set. The watch also has a freaking flight log function: a button press records the date, time, and position onto a map in the app, with a grouping function that batches multiple flights for easier management. There's a phone finder too.

The new G-Shock GRAVITYMASTER GWR-B3000 is available now, priced at $880. See more on the Casio website.

3/

ZRC Refreshes Their Very Unusual Grands Fonds MN64 in Titanium

I think this one also came out a while ago, but it’s never too late to write about a strange diver from ZRC. ZRC has been making dive watches since the late 1950s, when the French Navy contracted the brand to build the original Grands Fonds. But this is not just another dive watch built for the military, as it’s full of interesting quirks. For example, look at that crown at 6 o’clock. The case has a chunky, angular look, and it looks like it could survive a nuclear blast, let alone a dive. The modern ZRC is recreating these watches with a lot of gusto, and now they’re releasing the MN64 Titanium.

The case measures 41.5mm wide, but you need more numbers to tell the whole story of the watch. Unfortunately, we don’t get those numbers, which is a shame. What must be the case is that this should wear well with grade 5 titanium construction. While the material changes, the angular geometry stays, as does the ECS bezel, which flushes water through the mechanism to keep salt from gumming it up. The submarine-hatch caseback distributes pressure across the back rather than concentrating it, and the Crown Protection System (CPS) locks the watch out of use unless the crown is screwed all the way down. Now, this is obviously a chunky watch so you know that water resistance will be good. 300 meters, surely. Maybe 500? Hell, it could even be 1,000 meters. It sure could. But it’s not. Water resistance is rated to 3,000 meters and tested past 5,000 meters. Impressive

Two dials are available. The Full Titanium gets a sunray black face with applied markers and a date window, restrained and nearly monochrome. The Titanium Rubber version has a blue-to-black gradient with SLN 3D Lumicast indices. Both use applied metal indices and heavily lumed hands.

Inside is the Sellita SW300-1 in Elaboré grade, beating at 4Hz, with a 56-hour power reserve and regulated to around +/-5 seconds per day. The Full Titanium comes on a ladder-style titanium bracelet; the Titanium Rubber gets a yellow FKM strap.

The ZRC MN64 Titanium is available now, with the Full Titanium priced at CHF 4,690, and the rubber version at CHF 4,090. See more on the ZRC website.

4/

Panerai Wraps The Basic Luminor Marina PAM01707 In Very Cool Carbotech

Panerai's Carbotech has been around long enough now that it's no longer a novelty, but the material still puts a smile on my face whenever I see it used. I’ve always had a distain for carbon fiber, especially on cars, because it always looked cheap. It felt like plastic, and with the usual glossy finishes of the time, I felt like it could have easily been just a sticker. I’ve since changed my mind on carbon, but not on cars. That’s still tacky. I have, however, started liking carbon on watches. And Carbotech, while not pure carbon fiber you might find in other applications, is a material I like a lot. Panerai has been using it on their more complicated and expensive watches, but now it comes to the classic Luminor Marina model. This is the new PAM01707.

The case measures 44mm wide and 14.5mm thick. That case, as well as the bezel and crown protector are all made out of Carbotech, Panerai's own composite made by compressing carbon fibre layers with PEEK polymer. The layered construction means every case comes out with its own marbled pattern across the matte-black surface, so no two are quite identical. On top is a sapphire crystal, the titanium screw-down caseback is DLC coated and water resistance is 300 meters.

The dial keeps things pretty simple. The base is a matte black surface, a sandwich construction, with warm beige Super-LumiNova that glows green underneath and shown through the indicator cutouts, and no date. Small seconds sit at 9 o'clock. The thin pencil-style hands are done in black with beige lume inserts.

Inside is the automatic calibre P.9010, built at Richemont's ValFleurier facility, beating at 4Hz, with a three-day power reserve from twin barrels. It has an independently adjustable local hour hand that jumps in one-hour increments without stopping the movement, which makes it a practical travel watch. It comes on a brown vintage-style calf strap with beige stitching, plus a black rubber strap in the box.

The new Panerai Luminor Marina PAM01707 is available now, priced at €15,200. See more on the Panerai website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• By no fault of my own, I just realized that The Odyssey just might be the cultural event that I read most about this year. I’m not sure I wanted to, but here we are. And if I have to suffer, so do you. But I can’t lie, there’s been quite a lot of good writing about the movie. So, let’s do all three today about The Odyssey. Starting with an essay of exactly what I just mentioned — how The Odyssey discourse has dominated this summer.

• Then we have Ezra Klein from the NYT on how The Odyssey is the political movie of the decade, with its greatest trick being trojan-horsing Judeo-Christian norms into Greek myths.

• Last, the Guardian again on how the right hates The Odyssey because of its ‘wokeness’ – but it missed an even bigger threat to its worldview.

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One video you have to watch today

The internet’s favorite Japanese color book was made by Sanzo Wada, a runaway painter who shaped how Japan uses color and became the first Japanese person to win an Oscar. Almost everything he made disappeared, and then came back. This is his story.

Bold Fits Start with Bold Bags

Vacation.

Festivals.

Road trips.

Late nights.

Sprayground has styles built for all of it.

Shop The Drop

Thanks for reading,
Vuk

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. This morning I walked into my dentist’s office to see why I had the tiniest amount of pain when I sometimes drink cold water and walked out with my first ever root canal. So do excuse any post-anesthesia hallucinations.

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In this issue

• Seiko Turns Its First Dive Watch (Tribute) Green For A Europe-Only Lake Hallstatt Tribute

• Sicura Returns After Nearly Half A Century With The Hexa 400 Diver

• Héron Brightens Its Rainbow Decompression Diver With A White Dial And A Steel Countdown Bezel

• Chronoswiss Is As Original As You Expect Them To Be With Even When Using Stone Dials

👂What’s new

1/

Seiko Turns Its First Dive Watch (Tribute) Green For A Europe-Only Lake Hallstatt Tribute

The 62MAS from 1965, Seiko's first dive watch, is one of the most important models for both the brand and the industry at large. I’ve always wanted to own a 62MAS, I just bit the bullet to get one. But at the rate that Seiko is releasing variants of the 1965 Heritage Diver, a modern take on the 62MAS, I kind of doubt I will ever get the original because these are too good. Especially since the collection got an overhaul some two years ago. I mean, just look at this absolute banger of the HBC010. Unfortunately for the majority of my readers, but fortunately for me, this is a Europe-exclusive limited edition finished in a green-and-gilt scheme inspired by Austria's Lake Hallstatt.

The case follows the 62MAS closely, including the crown at 3 o'clock, which kind of has to be pointed out on Seiko watches. The 2024 revision trimmed things down slightly: 40mm wide, 13mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 46.4mm. You get a screw-down crown and caseback, a domed sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating, and a unidirectional bezel with a 60-minute scale. Water resistance is 300 meters.

Then, there’s the incredible green. Both dial and bezel are done in a dark green, though on the grained matte bezel insert it seams to look near black unless the sun hits it directly, with cream numerals and markings. Absolute perfection. The dial is more obviously green, a sunray brush, with gold-toned markers and hands filled with cream Lumibrite. The date window still sits at 4:30, the only downside to the watch.

Inside is the calibre 6R55, an automatic beating at 3Hz with a three-day power reserve. It comes on Seiko's steel bracelet with rounded links and the updated folding clasp, which includes a dive extension good for 15mm of adjustment across six 2.5mm steps. A black silicone strap with a pin buckle is included, so you have options out of the box.

The Seiko Prospex 1965 Heritage Diver HBC010 is limited to 1,400 pieces, sold only in Europe, priced at €1,650. See more on the Seiko website.

2/

Sicura Returns After Nearly Half A Century With The Hexa 400 Diver

Sicura is one of those Swiss names that I always wished they would come back. Founded in Grenchen in 1939 and built up under Ernest Schneider through the 1960s and 70s, it made affordable, oddball tool watches under the slogan "The Specialist for Specialities," everything from compressor divers to jump-hours to early LED digitals. Schneider used the profits to buy Breitling in 1979, moved Breitling production into Sicura's factory, and in 1993 renamed the company Breitling AG, quietly retiring the Sicura name. Now, 47 years on, it's back under the Netherlands-based D Group, and rather than reviving one of the weirder pieces from the catalogue, the new Hexa 400 builds on the 1968 Diver 400 and its dual-crown layout. It’s a sensible decision, I guess, but I’ll just remind you that Sicura once made a watch with a built in knife and a watch that timed the recommended time between two cigarettes for optimal health benefits (five minutes, if you’re wondering). I appreciate a good dive watch as much as the next guy, but a watch that counts down the time to your next dart as you use the built-in knife to whittle a piece of wood…? Come on!

The case is 40mm wide and keeps the original's angular hexagonal shape, though this version is sharper. It's made out of 316L stainless steel, brushed with polished chamfers, 14mm thick and 46mm lug-to-lug. Those are interesting proportions — it’s hella thick, not extremely wide and has a super-comfortable lug-to-lug. Screw-down crowns and that mass of thickness get it to 400 meters of water resistance, and the sapphire crystal has both anti-reflective and anti-fingerprint coatings. The bezel is a modern 120-click unidirectional unit with a black ceramic insert and a 60-minute Super-LumiNova scale.

Depending on the reference, you get blue-yellow, black-yellow or orange-white color combinations. That upper crown operates the bi-colour inner rotating ring for tracking a second time zone, making it somewhat of a GMT without the complexity of a third hand. The dial comes in black, blue or orange, cleaned up from the busier vintage version, with applied Super-LumiNova indices, a prominent 12 and broad faceted hands. There’s a date aperture at 3 o’clock.

Inside is the Sellita SW200, a pretty standard automatic choice with a 38-hour power reserve. It's the well-worn alternative to the ETA 2824-2, I just wish they opted for the upgraded power reserve version that was just released. The three-link steel bracelet closes with a double push-button deployant clasp with a safety lock and, crucially, a tool-free micro-adjustment system.

The Sicura Hexa 400 is available now, priced at €1,450. See more on the Sicura website.

3/

Héron Brightens Its Rainbow Decompression Diver With A White Dial And A Steel Countdown Bezel

Decompression dials had a real moment a few years back. The feature was a diving-era curiosity from the 1960s, made obsolete by dive computers decades ago, but the colorful scales came roaring back in the early 2020s when Mido and Vulcain revived them from their archives and brand like Christopher Ward jumped on the look for the first time. Héron, the small Canadian brand, did its own take with the original black Marinor Rainbow, and it pulled on a couple of my heartstrings. I love a good decompression dial. Their latest release, the Rainbow White, swaps the black top layer of the sandwich dial for white while keeping the pink, yellow, green and blue scale underneath. Now, to be honest upfront, Héron watches sell out like hotcakes and this one is no different. Why write about it then? Well, they do regular restocks, so keep an eye out for them if you want one.

The case is 39mm wide, a slender 10.6mm thick (that does go up to 12.2mm when you include the box-style ar-coated sapphire crystal), and has a 46mm lug-to-lug. Héron uses stainless steel that’s hardened up to 1200HV, and this white dial version uses the same steel for the bezel that’s etched with a 60-minute countdown scale on the brushed outer ring and an etched minute track on a polished inner ring. It’s cool, but the black version used a sapphire bezel insert, which is a touch cooler. Water resistance is 250 meters.

The dial is familiar and new at the same time. It’s a stark white base that has cutouts in it to show the lower level of the dial which is painted in rainbow colors. The handset is familiar: a faceted big-arrow hour hand, an obelisk minute hand and a lollipop seconds hand, all filled with blue-emission Super-LumiNova.

Inside is the Miyota calibre 9039, a reliable automatic and the sensible choice at this price. If I remember correctly, it beats at 4Hz and has roughly 42 hours of power reserve. You can have it on Héron's hardened steel three-link bracelet with screwed links, quick-release spring bars and a micro-adjustable folding clasp, or on a quick-release FKM rubber tropical strap, done in pearly white to match the dial.

Like I said, the Marinor Rainbow White is sold out now, but when it does come back into stock, they will set you back $600 on the rubber strap and $650 on the bracelet, which is a great price for what you get. See more on the Héron website.

4/

Chronoswiss Is As Original As You Expect Them To Be With Even When Using Stone Dials

The German brand Chronoswiss has become so well known for their regulator setups that it comes almost as a shock when they do something else. But even if the layout is not shocking, Chronoswiss is such a wildly cool brand that they will shock you with their brand. For their release they chose to do a small seconds setup with a stone dial. Sounds simple, right? Well, no, look at them. You’ve never seen stone dials like these.

The case is 40mm wide and 11.5mm thick, the smallest and slimmest in the current lineup. The 17-part construction keeps the details Chronoswiss is known for, including the signature fluting under the bezel and around the caseback, and the onion crown, slimmed down here to match the thinner case. Most surfaces are polished, with sandblasting in the recessed lugs for contrast. Domed sapphire crystals sit front and back. The crown doesn’t screw down, which drops water resistance to 30 meters.

These are cool cases, but just look at these cases. They use Jasper and Serpentine stones. The Jasper has beige, brown, yellow and ivory in an uniquely cool pattern, while the Serpentine is a mottled green stone quarried near the Matterhorn, set in a two-tone steel and red gold case. Because both are natural stone, no two dials are identical. The small seconds is positioned at 9 o'clock with a guilloché center and an outer track that echoes the minute flange. The Breguet-style Arabic numerals are applied directly onto the stone and the leaf-shaped hour and minute hands get Super-LumiNova.

Inside is the automatic calibre C.6000, developed with La Joux-Perret in 2003 for the Delphis line. It has an openworked tungsten rotor, ruthenium-plated bridges and plates, radiating Côtes de Genève, a 55-hour power reserve and a 4Hz beat rate. The Jasper comes on a brown calfskin strap, the Serpentine on green calfskin.

Each edition is limited to 50 pieces. The Small Second Jasper retails for CHF 11,500 and the two-tone Serpentine for CHF 16,900. See more of the Jasper here and the Serpentine here.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• Across the United States, dozens of law enforcement officers face accusations of misusing Flock, a surveillance network of 120,000 cameras that track license plates. Flock’s proponents claim that the technology does far more good than harm; one investor tells the Washington Post that abuse is “truly a nonissue.” But fear isn’t a statistic. Drew Harwell, Douglas MacMillan, and Aaron Schaffer structure their investigation of Flock’s misuse by law enforcement around the story of a woman in suburban Atlanta who had her whereabouts tracked hundreds of times by her ex, the local chief of police. Their report telescopes between the tradeoffs of a “transformational” technology and a few nightmarish cases of misuse.

• The war in Iran began five months ago. Headline news about the conflict tends to focus on when and how it might end. In the meantime, the impacts of the conflict are felt worldwide—by drivers, farmers, business owners, and families. The Associated Press shares the stories of seven people suffering because of the war. Among them is Edgar Funelas, a jeepney driver in the Philippines who lives with his ten-year-old daughter.

• Mark Seal is very fond of the phrase “Who Ya Gonna Call? Scam Busters!”—he uses it three times in this piece. Yet it’s still refreshing, despite being from last year, to read a story that focuses on the painstaking effort to trace scammers rather than lingering on the victim’s humiliation (looking at you, Netflix). Seal does explain how a French woman named Anne fell for “Brad Pitt” online and subsequently lost her fortune to the scammers, but her supposed savior, cyber‑detective Marwan Ouarab—sporting a cat‑in‑a‑trench‑coat T‑shirt—gets most of the page time here. Ouarab apparently found the scammers within 48 hours, but no charges have been made, and Anne is still fighting to recover any of her money. You can call the scam busters, but you’re still in for a long wait.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

A very nice doc.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. We’re starting August, which means there won’t be as many releases until Geneva Watch Days in September. So, expect a bit less coverage in the coming weeks!

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In this issue

• TAG Heuer Gets Back With Team Ikuzawa With A 39mm Glassbox Chronograph

• Timex Teams Up With Todd Snyder For An Elegant Take On The Marlin Mesh

• Glashütte Original Dips The SeaQ In Turquoise For A North America-Only "Northern Tide" Pair

• Sylvain Pinaud Puts A 30-Second Tourbillon At The Center Of His Origine Architecture

👂What’s new

1/

TAG Heuer Gets Back With Team Ikuzawa With A 39mm Glassbox Chronograph

Tetsu Ikuzawa was one of the great postwar Japanese racing drivers, with a career that ran through the Japanese Grand Prix, Formula 3, Formula 2, Le Mans, and factory drives for Porsche, all under a distinctive red-and-white livery. His team, Team Ikuzawa, is now run by his daughter Mai Ikuzawa as a design and motorsport brand, and that same red-and-white has translated well into design experiments. Designs that include watch dials, like those done with TAG Heuer. Where the 2023 version used the 42mm Carrera, this one, made in collaboration with Bamford Watch Department, is built on the 39mm Glassbox Chronograph, which is the best modern Carrera the brand makes.

The 39mm steel case remains unchanged from the standard Glassbox. Finishing is brushed and polished, the crown at 3 o'clock has a red lacquered ring, and the pushers keep the vintage pump-style shape. On top is that sensational domed sapphire crystal that slopes over the internal flange with no conventional bezel. The caseback is engraved with Team Ikuzawa and Bamford marks alongside the individual number. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The dial is white with a Clou de Paris texture in the center of the dial, which I think might be the first of the Glassboxes to get this much of a texture. The applied indices from the standard Glassbox are gone, replaced by printed markings for 60 minutes climbing up that sloped flange. Red does the heavy lifting: the logos, the lacquered hour and minute hands, the central chronograph seconds, and even the date wheel, where every numeral is printed in the team's red. There’s no running seconds sub-dial, replaced by the Team Ikuzawa logo above the date at 6 o'clock, with a 30-minute counter at 3 and a 12-hour counter at 9. Interestingly, the tachymetre dial on the flange has been replaced with a detailed minute track in white on black

Inside is the automatic calibre TH20-10, TAG Heuer's in-house chronograph with a column wheel, vertical clutch, and 80-hour power reserve. It comes on the new seven-row steel bracelet, with two extra straps in the box: perforated white leather with red stitching, and a white textile strap with red stripes pulled from the racing livery. The whole thing ships in a mechanic's-toolbox package with a travel pouch and a set of Team Ikuzawa charms.

The TAG Heuer Carrera Chronograph x Team Ikuzawa is limited to 150 pieces and priced at €10,450. See more on the TAG Heuer website.

2/

Timex Teams Up With Todd Snyder For An Elegant Take On The Marlin Mesh

Timex is one of those brands that works fantastically on their own, but gets even better with a good collaboration. And working with menswear designer Todd Snyder has to be a good collab any way you look at it. For this collaboration, the two brands chose the simple, small, but very popular Marlin on the mesh bracelet, paired with some pretty dials.

The case keeps the original at 34mm wide in polished steel, with a vintage-looking domed acrylic crystal on top. This watch is about as simple as it gets, with angular lugs, simple bezel and some 30 meters of water resistance.

The dial is where the changes from the regular collection show up. You get applied metallic Roman numerals at the cardinal points, dashes between them, and a railroad minute track around the rim. Snyder's stylized "TS" sits above six o'clock. Three color options are available: sunburst silver, pink, and sky blue. These dials are interesting as they use quite pastely shares of the mentioned colors, but that’s contrasted by the shine of the sunburst finishing.

The original variant had a hand-wound movement, which gave it charm but also, if we're being honest, a reputation for being fussy. This one gets a quartz movement. Purists will grumble, but I think that’s perfect for a watch like this. The watches come on silver Milanese-style mesh bracelets.

The Timex X Todd Snyder Marlin Mesh doesn’t seem to be limited and it’s available now, priced at $199. See more on the Todd Snyder website.

3/

Glashütte Original Dips The SeaQ In Turquoise For A North America-Only "Northern Tide" Pair

When I say dive watch, the chances of you instantly thinking of Glashütte Original are slim, approaching none. And yet… if you are in the market for a luxury-adjacent dive watch, and do not want to look like a junior investment banker that just got their first bonus check, Glashütte Original just might have what you want in the SeaQ collection. Now, we’re getting a duo of watches in that collection — a regular SeaQ and a SeaQ Panorama Date that are headed for the North American market, called “Northern Tide”, with a turquoise dégradé dial.

Both cases are stainless steel and unchanged from the models we’ve seen before. The smaller SeaQ is 39.5mm wide with 200 meters of water resistance, while the Panorama Date measures 43.2mm and 300 meters of water resistance. Each gets a unidirectional bezel with a black ceramic insert, a screw-down crown, and a sapphire caseback, and both have dual certification to DIN 8306 and ISO 6425.

The two watches share the same dial base, a matte turquoise lacquer fading to black at the edges, with rhodium-plated applied numerals and indices filled with Super-LumiNova and extra luminous dots for the hours. The SeaQ has a date at 3 o'clock on a white disc with black numerals; the Panorama Date uses the brand's signature large date at 4 o'clock, here in black with white print.

The SeaQ has the manufacture calibre 39-11, automatic, with a 40-hour power reserve and the usual hours, minutes, seconds and date. The Panorama Date steps up to the in-house calibre 36-13, which drives the large date and has a considerably more useful 100-hour power reserve. Both are hand-assembled, decorated and regulated, with proper Glashütte finishing on display through the sapphire back. Each watch ships on a steel bracelet with the fine-adjustment clasp plus an additional black synthetic strap with a folding clasp.

The SeaQ "Northern Tide" is priced at $13,000 and the SeaQ Panorama Date "Northern Tide" is $15,500, each limited to 100 pieces. See more on the Glashütte Original website, the SeaQ is here and the SeaQ Panorama Date here.

4/

Sylvain Pinaud Puts A 30-Second Tourbillon At The Center Of His Origine Architecture

This is one of those watches that came out a few months ago and I missed them. Since we’re kind of in the summer slow-down era, I went digging for watches that fell through the crack. And boy, am I glad I did. Sylvain Pinaud has spent the last few years building a reputation on the Origine, a time-only watch that kind of drops jaws wherever it shows up. Now, for the follow-up, it adds a tourbillon. This is the new Sylvain Pinaud 30-Second Tourbillon and it’s pretty incredible.

The case measures 39mm wide and 11.20mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 48mm, offered in either titanium or platinum. Those are sensible dimensions for a tourbillon, which too often can grow up fat and oversized. The titanium version weighs 39 grams without a strap; the platinum one comes in at 105 grams, and I love that dichotomy allowing you to choose exactly what kind of experience you would like to have with this thing. The one thing the two materials share is the water resistance, which is 30 meters.

The dial keeps the asymmetry from the Origine, with black polished steel components structuring a hand-grained surface. Three variants of the dial are available: the titanium model pairs a silver dial with a white agate center and black hands, while the two platinum models get a black dial with an onyx center and rose gold hands, or a white dial with a white agate center and blued steel hands. On the left side is a large seconds sub-dial.

The hand-wound in-house movement beats at 3Hz with a really nice 100-hour power reserve coming from a double barrel. The 30-second tourbillon uses a titanium cage, about 20% lighter than steel. The finishing is impeccable: hand-filed bevels with sharp inner angles, a barrel bridge on the back treated as a sculptural element, wheels anglaged on both sides. It ships on various leather straps with a 20mm lug width.

Each variant is limited to 10 pieces, 30 in total. Price is set at CHF 180,000, wihtout taxes. See more on the Sylvain Pinaud website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• When Leslie Buck was discovered dead in her home in 2002, Mystic, Connecticut went into shock. What had happened to the grade school teacher and who had wanted her to die? For journalist Brenna Ehrlich, this one was personal; Buck had been her teacher in grade one. In her latest for Rolling Stone, Ehrlich returns to Mystic to learn more about who Leslie Buck was and why she was murdered

• Linni Kral has always been preoccupied with her bowels, but as a food writer, it hasn’t usually been that end she’s focused on in her writing. Now, as the internet explodes with “scat chat,” Kral is ready to investigate whether obsessing over our bowel movements has any merit. The result is a giggle fest—though you’ll need the stomach for some serious poo talk.

• Daniel left school five years ago and still lives with his parents—pretty normal in a country where around a third of young British men haven’t moved out. What is different about Daniel is his identification as “hikikomori”—literally “pulled inward”—a form of extreme social isolation. Since leaving school, he has left his family home “maybe once a month.” Research into hikikomori is limited, though some links with social anxiety and autism have been drawn. In this piece, Eve Livingston explores what day-to-day life is actually like for the families living with this phenomenon, doggedly seeking access to a world built to avoid in‑person encounters.

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One video you have to watch today

I just found my old iPods, so this is a very relevant video to me. Maybe it will be to you as well.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. I completely understand the sentiment of that Mr Jones watch. I feel that way every time I look at a watch.

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In this issue

• Doxa Teams Up With Hodinkee To Shrink The Elusive Army Into The New SUB 200T

• Mido Goes Full Black With The Octagonal Multifort 8 One Crown

• Mr Jones Watches Turns Everyday Frustration Into A Watch With The Right Amount Of Rage

• Abinger Takes A Step Into The Dark Side With The New Phantom

• Franck Muller Revisits Forged Carbon With The New Vanguard Ocean Drive Slim

👂What’s new

1/

Doxa Teams Up With Hodinkee To Shrink The Elusive Army Into The New SUB 200T

The Doxa Army is one of those watches that are just an absolute legend. Built in 1969 with the Swiss Army as a dedicated mil-spec diver, it swapped the SUB 300's orange dial for a tan checkerboard layout and a black oil-dipped and then heated case, then went out to a tiny number of support personnel attached to the combat divers unit. Surviving pieces are the stuff of obsession. Doxa also remade the watch several times, and now they’re doing it again by partnering up with Hodinkee. But with a twist. This time, the Army dial goes into the smaller SUB 200T case. That’s very interesting.

The case is 39mm wide, 10.70mm thick, with a 41.50mm lug-to-lug and 18mm lugs, which shaves roughly ten percent off the old Army footprint and makes it easily wearable on pretty much any wrist out there. It's made out of raw 316L stainless steel. It would have been interesting if they went for some sort of modern experimental black coating like the oil-dipping, but maybe one day. There’s no helium escape valve on the SUB 200T, but you do get 200 meters of water resistance. True to the military original, the bezel drops Doxa's famous no-deco scale for a straight 60-minute countdown.

The dial is where things get even more interesting for me. It looks like an Army dial, but it’s not a 1/1 reproduction. In the center of the dial is a roughly textured sand colored surface, surrounded by a checkerboard track and a matching date wheel in a faded "Hodinkee Grey." The same grey is used on the bezel. This is a departure from the black of the original dial, but it does look like a nicely faded Army dial without stepping into gimmick territory. Etched numerals and the orientation triangle get Old Radium Super-LumiNova, and you get Doxa's oversized orange hands.

Inside is the Sellita SW200-1 movement in the élaboré grade, decorated by Doxa. It beats at 4Hz with a 38 hour power reserve. The watch comes on a tan rubber strap with a grey NATO in the box, and the steel folding clasp has a ratcheting wetsuit extension.

The new Doxa SUB Army 200T For Hodinkee is limited to 250 pieces, priced at $2,000. The watch is only available from Watches of Switzerland which now owns Hodinkee. See more on Hodinkee.

2/

Mido Goes Full Black With The Octagonal Multifort 8 One Crown

Is this like the third time in the past two weeks that I’m pointing out that Mido has been building one of the best-value Swiss automatics for years without much fanfare. And it’s not getting boring. The new Multifort 8 One Crown takes the octagonal case that's become a genre unto itself since a certain Gérald Genta design and drops it into all-black PVD. At CHF 920, it's playing in a crowded field, but MIDO tends to win these fights on substance.

The case is 40mm wide with a lug-to-lug of 44.86mm, so it'll wear compact on most wrists. It's stainless steel with a black PVD coating, with the eight-sided bezel satin-finished on top and polished on the flanks. On top is a sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coatings on both sides. The crown screws down, the case back screws on, and that gets you 100 meters of water resistance.

The dial is deep black with horizontal lines running across it, echoed in the strap. Applied indexes are polished steel with Super-LumiNova, and the hours and minutes hands are tri-faceted, satin-finished, and lumed. There's a date at 3 o'clock, a minute track on the flange, and a flat diamond-polished seconds hand.

Inside is the automatic Caliber 80, a version of the ETA C07.611, beating at 3Hz with a Nivachron balance spring for magnetic and thermal resistance. Power reserve is, of course, fantastic at 80 hours. You see it through the case back, decorated with Côtes de Genève and the Mido logo on the rotor. The strap is black rubber with a relief motif, with a PVD pin buckle.

The Mido Multifort 8 One Crown in black is available now, priced at CHF 920. See more on the Mido website.

3/

Mr Jones Watches Turns Everyday Frustration Into A Watch With The Right Amount Of Rage

Mr Jones Watches has a pretty clear message behind their watches, and they’ve had that since the beginning: nobody actually needs a watch to tell the time anymore, so a watch may as well do something else. Sure, all of their watches tell the time, but they bring a lot of commentary to the table as well. Their latest, called &#@%!?, sends a clear message on how slowly a bad day moves. It’s designed by Rocky Beeson, the brand's in-house printmaker and this her second design for them.

The case is stainless steel, 37mm wide with a lug-to-lug of 46mm, capped with a sapphire crystal. Water resistance is 5ATM, enough for messy hand washing and rain and not much more.

But like all Mr Jones watches, this one has the schtick on the dial. Instead of conventional hands you get two hands lettered "Slow as Fuck" and "Not as Slow," sweeping around to tell you roughly how much of your life a pointless meeting has consumed. Beeson's whole approach is summed up in her line about seeing something, hating it, and drawing it, and that is all over this dial. It's a good gag executed cleanly, which is the hard part with novelty watches.

Inside is a single-jewel quartz movement, so this is about the design rather than the mechanics, and that's the honest bargain at this price. The watch comes on an 18mm silver stainless steel strap.

&#@%!? is on sale now, limited to 300 pieces. Price is set at €245. See more on the Mr Jones website.

4/

Abinger Takes A Step Into The Dark Side With The New Phantom

Abinger is the young UK brand founded by Thomas Howison Hill, and its debut, the Nimrod, was one of the more talked-about sub-£1,000 releases of the past year: a compact GADA diver with a GMT bezel that a lot of people thought punched well above its price. The Phantom is the second act, and it takes that same case, just giving it a blacked-out DLC case and two lume-forward variants called Luna and Nox

The case carries over the Nimrod’s proportions at 38mm wide and a decent 10.8mm thick, with a 45mm lug-to-lug and 20mm lugs. It's made out of 316L steel finished in black DLC, sandblasted on the lugs and brushed on the caseback. There are sapphire crystals on top and bottom. A uni-directional 12-hour bezel tracks a second time zone on a DLC-coated steel insert, and a screw-down crown gets you 200 meters of water resistance.

Two dials are available. The Luna has a fully lumed C3 dial with black markers, numerals, and skeletonised hands; while the Nox gets a deep matte black dial with raised, moulded ceramic C3 blocks for indices and heavily coated sword hands. Both get a black rehaut with C3 second markers and discreet PHANTOM text.

Inside is the Miyota 9039, the no-date automatic they also used in the Nimrod. It beats at 4Hz, has 42 hours of power reserve, and is regulated to -10/+15 seconds a day. The watches come on a black FKM strap with a matching DLC buckle.

Worth knowing: unlike the Nimrod, the Phantom is assembled in the UK, which Abinger says lets it keep tighter control of QC and after-sales. Pre-orders open tomorrow, August 1, at £699 with UK shipping included, rising to an RRP of £725. Shipping is expected to start in March 2027. See more on the Abinger website.

5/

Franck Muller Revisits Forged Carbon With The New Vanguard Ocean Drive Slim

Franck Muller kind of has that one schtick, the tonneau case. But when you box yourself into a limitation, like the set shape of the case, it allows you to be creative in other areas. And that means that the brand has rendered the Vanguard in everything from super elegant to extremely sport. For their latest model, they’ve paired up with Hamburg’s Juwelier Becker to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the retailer with the Vanguard Ocean Drive Slim which gets a forged carbon case.

The case measures 41mm wide and comes from a single block of aerospace-grade carbon, 150 layers compressed and then machined in-house. Franck Muller adds black inserts on both flanks. There are sapphire crystals on top and bottom. Water resistance is only 30 meters, which is a true shame as this looks like a fantastic summer watch but doesn’t measure up to that image.

You get the choice of a deep black or sky blue dial, and those dials are matched to the straps for a full look. The iconic oversized applied numerals are painted by hand to match the strap color, with stitching that carries the same tone through. The base of the dial is the same forged carbon as the case, with a small seconds at 6 o'clock.

Inside is the in-house calibre FM 708-S6, an automatic beating at 3Hz, with a 42-hour power reserve. It's a compact movement at 29.9mm across and under 4mm thick, which is what lets Franck Muller call this a Slim. The strap fastens with a stainless steel folding buckle finished in black PVD.

The Vanguard Ocean Drive Slim is limited to 15 examples, priced at €15,000, available exclusively through Juwelier Becker in Hamburg. See more on the Franck Muller website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• For Eater, Bettina Makalintal reports on a refreshing trend in the restaurant industry: businesses embracing lo-fi, handwritten communications and announcements in response to the ceaseless AI slop we’re served across social media these days. From a grocery store’s hand-illustrated flyers to a burger joint’s Sharpie-scribbled menu specials, restaurants are choosing advertising with a human touch and rejecting polished AI-generated graphics.

• A line of lichen-crusted stones snakes through a Vermont meadow, half-collapsed, half-enduring, as one man bends to lift and reset what time keeps undoing. What begins as a pandemic hobby becomes something stranger: a meditation on labor, permanence, and the quiet seduction of making order from ruin. Why do we keep rebuilding what will inevitably fall?

• Frustrated that law enforcement and government officials are unable to help them, Venice property owners have called upon a private company, staffed by former gang members, to remove encampments in their neighborhood. For L.A. Material, Hayes Davenport talked to one of the company’s owners—lifelong Venice resident Bobby Luna—as well as dozens of locals, from homeowners to unhoused folks, about the company’s presence in the community. Homeowners are satisfied with Ghost Town’s service, while some unhoused people who have been forced to relocate report harassment and physical force from its employees.

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This dude WhistlinDiesel found the best use for a Tesla Cybertruck. Great to see.

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Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. I’ve always wondered why people were so upset if a watch doesn’t have a date complication. And I do mean upset. It’s not just a dealbreaker to them, they get angry at the watch for not having it. What’s up with that? Every watch looks better without a date.

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In this issue

• MING Puts a Hammered Pewter Dial Into Its 37-Series Titanium Case

• Bell & Ross Embraces Sage With The BR-05 GMT Green Steel

• Baltic Adds The Date People Kept Asking For To The Aquascaphe MK2

• Parmigiani Fleurier Turns Thirty With A Platinum Trilogy Of Complications That Vanish On Command

• Vincent Deprez Rethinks His Geneva Tourbillon As A Scientific Instrument

👂What’s new

1/

MING Puts a Hammered Pewter Dial Into Its 37-Series Titanium Case

MING has never been shy about asking a lot from a dial, but pewter is new territory even for them. This 88-piece limited edition comes out of a collaboration with Royal Selangor, the Kuala Lumpur pewter house that's been at it since 1885. The collaboration started with a MING patron and his camera. He'd asked Royal Selangor to reskin the camera, then asked Ming Thein if he'd help collect it in Kuala Lumpur. That errand turned into a long lunch between Thein and Yong Yoon Li, Royal Selangor's CEO, and the friendship (plus this watch) came directly out of that conversation. Royal Selangor itself goes back to 1885, when Yong Koon, a young pewtersmith from Shantou, arrived in the tin-rich state of Selangor and started making incense burners and candlestands for temples and tin miners.

The case is MING's familiar 37-series in grade-2 titanium, 38mm wide and 11.05mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 44.73mm and a 20mm lug width. It's all-brushed and weighs 35.9 grams, which is barely anything on the wrist. Water resistance is 100 meters, and the caseback carries both the MING and Royal Selangor wordmarks. Domed sapphire crystals front and rear both get double-sided anti-reflective coating.

But what is pewter? It's a tin-based alloy, strengthened with small amounts of copper and antimony. Royal Selangor's version is nearly 97-percent tin, which meets the highest international standard for the material. What makes it interesting for a watch dial is that it doesn't tarnish or corrode easily, and over time it develops a soft patina. The manufacturing process is still largely manual: the metals are melted together, poured into steel moulds, left to cool, then filed, polished, and finished mostly by hand. It's rarely used in watchmaking, which only makes it interesting. Royal Selangor hand-hammers every dial for a very cool texture. Like many Ming watches, there are no markers on the dial. Instead, the front crystal is engraved with the hour track and markers, and filled with Super-LumiNova X1, matched by X1-coated hands.

Inside is the Sellita for MING SW300.M1, an automatic with roughly 50 hours of power reserve, and quite beautiful to look at with skeletonized rhodium-plated bridges over an anthracite baseplate. The strap is a blue-grey goat leather from Jean Rousseau with curved quick-release bars and a flying-blade tuck buckle, and it arrives in a hammered pewter presentation box made by Royal Selangor.

The MING 37.06 Royal Selangor is limited to 88 pieces, priced at CHF 5,000 without taxes. The watches will be available through Royal Selangor boutiques from today, 30 July 2026 and via the Ming website from 6 August. See more on the Ming website.

2/

Bell & Ross Embraces Sage With The BR-05 GMT Green Steel

Bell & Ross has decided 2026 is the year of green. I think this might be their third green watch they released this year. I’m not complaining, as each one is a very interesting take on the color. This latest one comes in the form of the BR-05 GMT Green Steel which, as the name suggests, adds a GMT complication to the familiar cockpit-instrument shape.

The case is 41mm wide and a slim 11mm thick, in satin-finished and polished steel with a screw-down crown and crown guard. Water resistance is 100 meters, the sapphire crystal gets anti-reflective coating, and the caseback is sapphire so you can watch the 360° rotor do its work.

Bell & Ross calls the dial sage green with silver reflections, and the shade comes from a three-step process: sunray brushing on a metal base, a tinted green varnish, then a clear glossy coat over the top. Indices and numerals are polished rhodium-plated appliques filled with Super-LumiNova X1 that glows green, matched by skeletonised rhodium hands including the arrow-tipped GMT hand. The two-tone 24-hour flange in green and silver indicates the second time zone.

Inside is the calibre BR-CAL.325-1, an automatic with a 54-hour power reserve, with the GMT hand quick-set independently of the main hour hand, making it a traveller style GMT. It’s based on the Sellita SW330-1. It comes on your choice of green rubber or a satin-and-polished steel bracelet with a folding buckle.

The Bell & Ross BR-05 GMT Green Steel is available now, priced at €5,800. See more on the Bell & Ross website.

3/

Baltic Adds The Date People Kept Asking For To The Aquascaphe MK2

When Baltic reworked the Aquascaphe into the MK2 platform last September, the one thing the new version didn't offer was a date. And some people took that personally. I can’t even begin to count the number of Reddit comments that said they would buy the watch in a heartbeat if only it had a date (I’m lying, it’s probably like 7 comments, I’m just too lazy to go down that rabbit-hole). Well, here’s your chance if you were waiting, because Baltic just added the date complication to both sizes of the MK2 Aquascaphe.

Instead of the usual 3 o'clock cutout, the date sits at 6 o'clock. That keeps the dial symmetrical, and the date disc is color matched to each dial. While I’m certainly not a date fan, this is the best way to integrate it if we must have one. Everything else is the MK2 you already know: 37mm or 39.5mm stainless steel cases, Lumicast solid ceramic markers, larger hands with a generous helping of Super-LumiNova, and a fully graduated unidirectional bezel. The four dial colors remain unchanged, Blue, Grey, Green and Warm Silver, with the date at 6 o'clock the only thing separating the Date from the standard version.

The Date swaps the no-date Miyota 9039 for the Miyota calibre 9015, an automatic running at 4Hz with roughly 42 hours of power reserve. Strap options are unchanged, with a color matched rubber strap option or one of Baltic's steel bracelets.

The Aquascaphe MK2 Date is available now across the full collection, both sizes and all four colors, starting at €805.65 on rubber against €774.90 for the no-date version. See more on the Baltic website.

4/

Parmigiani Fleurier Turns Thirty With A Platinum Trilogy Of Complications That Vanish On Command

Thirty years in, Parmigiani Fleurier is celebrating the way a company confident in its own taste tends to: understatedly, expensively, and with an extremely well defined sense of self. And they’re continuing their 30th anniversary with a trio of Tonda PF watches that all share the same two tricks: first, they are made out of solid platinum, and second, they all have hidden complications that show up at a press of a button. The GMT Rattrapante hides a second time zone, the Minute Rattrapante hides a countdown hand, and the Chronographe Mystérieux hides an entire flyback chronograph. I love these watches so, so, much.

All three cases measure 40mm wide, with the two rattrapante models at 10.7mm thick and the chronograph at 13mm. Everything is made out of 950 platinum, dial included, with the knurled bezels and integrated bracelets that define the Tonda PF look. Sapphire crystals front and back on all of them. All three also come on fully platinum integrated bracelets. I can only imagine how heavy this thing is on wrist. Water resistance is where the three models are most different, and it’s counterintuitive: the two rattrapantes get 60 meters while the most complicated watch, the chronograph, gets 100 meters.

Like I said, everything on these watches is platinum, including the dials which have a wonderful non-reflective sandblasted finish. Perfectly executed. Contrasting with the bright silver platinum are the 18k gold indices. On the GMT, a white gold hand shows local time and an 18k rose gold hand shows home time; press the pusher in the crown and the local hand catches up to swallow the rose gold one, leaving a plain two-hander. The Minute Rattrapante does the same thing with a rose gold countdown hand you advance in one- or five-minute steps using teardrop pushers, then snap back under the main minute hand when you're done. The Chronographe Mystérieux is the masterpiece: the three time hands reset and take over chronograph duty while two rose gold hands emerge to keep telling the time, no subdials anywhere. What an incredible watch this is.

The GMT uses the automatic calibre PF051 and the Minute Rattrapante the PF052, both with gold micro-rotors, both beating at 3Hz with a 48-hour power reserve. The chronograph gets the purpose-built PF053, an automatic integrated monopusher column-wheel movement beating at 4Hz with a longer 60-hour reserve, operated by a single pusher on the case flank at 7:30.

The celebratory Parmigiani Fleurier Tonda PF watches are limited to 30 examples each, available individually or as a set of three. The Tonda PF GMT Rattrapante is priced at CHF 91,000, the Minute Rattrapante at CHF 93,000, and the Chronographe Mystérieux at CHF 99,600. See more on the Parmigiani Fleurier website.

5/

Vincent Deprez Rethinks His Geneva Tourbillon As A Scientific Instrument

Vincent Deprez trained at Vacheron Constantin and did restoration work at Patek Philippe before going out on his own. Now he builds his tourbillons by hand, one at a time, in a Geneva workshop stocked with old machine tools rather than a bank of CNC cutters. He made his name with the Tourbillon Classique Souscription, a very accomplished debut, and the new Scientific Tourbillon is the evolution of the concept. However, where the earlier watches leaned classical, this one takes its cues from twentieth-century instrument watches: legible, technical, stripped of ornament.

The case is 39mm wide and 11.3mm thick in stainless steel, with a mix of polished and satin surfaces that give it the more modern look compared to the polished Classic series. On top is a domed sapphire crystal, while out back is a Grade 5 titanium caseback that integrates directly into the case middle and secures through the lugs, leaving a completely flat profile with no break in the line. Water resistance is 30 meters.

While the case gets slight updates for a more contemporary look, it’s the dial that gets the majority of changes. The earlier Tourbillon Classique put the regulator front and center under a big straight bridge. Here a midnight-blue grand feu enamel time dial sits at 12 o'clock, ringed by a mirror-polished applied steel chapter ring with a detailed minute track. Deprez fires each dial himself. The tourbillon below, with its blue seconds ring around the one-minute cage, is still quite the beautiful thing to behold.

The hand-wound movement is very familiar from previous variants, and most of it is made by hand in the workshop: bridges and plates cut on pantograph engravers, wheels, pivots and pinions turned on vintage lathes. It beats at a traditional 2.5Hz with roughly a 52-hour reserve. Finishing is entirely manual, German silver bridges done with graining, anglage, satin and black polishing. The watch comes on a grained calfskin strap.

Now, for a number of pieces of bad news, the main of which is that you’ll never own this. Not because it’s ridiculously expensive. We don’t know the cost, but it shouldn’t be extreme for this level of watch. While many in this category ask for multiples of three figures, the earlier Tourbillon Classique was CHF 89,500 so you can expect this one to be around the same level. The bigger problem is that this watch is limited to 10 pieces, and all 10 have been sold. Why write about it then, you ask? Well, it’s a very nice watch, so I find it good to document its existance. See more on the Vincent Deprez website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• Fifa essentially announced the other day that they will be selling the World Cup to Donald Trump, which is as insane a sentence I could imagine ever writing. Which is why this analysis from The Athletic on how massive of a financial juggernaut the WC has become (meaning that Trump and his lackeys will get the event for an absolute bargain) is even more of an insightful read than it was last week.

• On a sunlit cliff above Ithaca’s wine-dark sea, a translator chases Homer’s ghosts—through caves, across languages, into the raw machinery of rage, love, and survival. Emily Wilson strips the epics to their pulse, unsettling centuries of reverence. But what happens when clarity exposes the violence we’ve learned to admire—and ourselves within it?

• Terry Ellis’s fixer wore an overcoat, a multicolored ascot, a Rolex. He had a husky voice and a good suntan. He reminded Ellis of the English actor Ray Winstone, best known for playing hard men in films like Sexy Beast and The Departed. Ellis, who was himself a hard man, sought inspiration from crime movies, the way an artist scrutinizes the canvases of the great masters. It was a viewing of Ocean’s Eleven that had led to the most successful phase of his criminal career. By the winter of 2007, Ellis had become one of his generation’s most dependable, and accomplished, heistmen.

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One video you have to watch today

Would anyone like to buy this newsletter? I’m not yet sure what the price would be, I just need to see first how much the TWR Supercat in this video is. It will be that much

Thanks for reading,
Vuk

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Nothing smart from me today, I’m late for kindergarten pickup!

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In this issue

• Citizen Combines The Sporty Shore Case With The Nostalgic Time Slip Dial For A New Limited Tsuyosa

• Bulova Revives Its Post-War Watchmaking Legacy With The Military VWI Special Edition Chronograph

• Mido Gives Their Smallest Multifort TV A Rose Gold Colored Case And A Brown Dial

• The Corniche Heritage Chronograph Visage Is A Very Nice Watch If You Find Yourself On The French Riviera

• This Is Anton Suhanov's First Balance-Forward Wristwatch, The Flamingo

👂What’s new

1/

Citizen Combines The Sporty Shore Case With The Nostalgic Time Slip Dial For A New Limited Tsuyosa

Citizen has been running one of the best value plays in automatic watches with the Tsuyosa, and this year it gave the line a proper sports personality in the Shore, with a rotating bezel and 100 meters of water resistance. While I’m a huge fan of the Tsuyosa, I remember being a bit underwhelmed by the Shore collection. I guess I was alone on that, as Citizen is expanding the collection, now with the smoked, retro "Time Slip" dial that worked so well on last year's 37mm limited edition. The result is the Tsuyosa Shore Time Slip, and it looks fantastic.

The stainless steel case carries over from the rest of the larger Shore models: 40mm wide, 12.5mm thick, with the integrated-style silhouette that has defined the Tsuyosa since the start. You get brushed surfaces with polished accents, a recessed crown at 4 o'clock, and a sapphire crystal with a date magnifier. The bezel is the Shore's unidirectional rotating type, but here it wears a gold-toned 60-minute scale on a black background that plays into the vintage theme. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The dial is the main novelty. Citizen has taken the Time Slip treatment that they used before and applied it here: a finely grained texture under a smoked black gradient, with gold-coloured applied markers and hands filled with lume. The printing is gold to match.

Inside is Citizen's in-house Calibre 8210, beating at 3 Hz with about 42 hours of power reserve and hacking seconds. It is a workhorse that has carried much of the Tsuyosa range, and there is a transparent caseback so you can watch it run. The watch comes on the same three-link stainless steel bracelet as the other Shore models, brushed and polished to match the case, with a folding clasp.

The Citizen Tsuyosa Shore Time Slip, reference NJ0238-57E, goes on sale in August 2026 as a limited edition of 12,000, priced at €359. See more on the Citizen website.

2/

Bulova Revives Its Post-War Watchmaking Legacy With The Military VWI Special Edition Chronograph

Back in 1945, as servicemen were returning from the War, Bulova tried to lend a hand in helping these veterans have an easier life. They did so by running a watchmaking school for returning soldiers, which was a noble effort. And it gives them legitimacy when they partner in modern days with the Veterans Watchmaker Initiative which trains U.S. veterans in professional watchmaking. To support the VWI, Bulova just released Military VWI Special Edition, of which 10% of sales will go towards the program. That’s a great sentiment, but perhaps more importantly, this is one great looking watch.

The case is 42mm wide, stainless steel, cushion-shaped, with a mostly brushed finish and polished touches on the coin-edge bezel, crown, and pushers. It draws on 1940s military chronographs and does so well. A domed mineral crystal sits on top, which is a shame because acrylic would have fit so much better with the retro styling. The solid screw-down caseback is engraved with artwork marking the Bulova-VWI partnership. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The dial is olive green, which sells the military identity. A railroad minute track wraps around lumed Arabic numerals, and the hour, minute, and central chronograph seconds hands are lumed too. The layout is tri-compax: a 60-minute counter at nine o'clock, an uncommon 1/20-second indicator at three that only reads out once you stop the chronograph, and a small seconds register at six with a date window integrated into it on a black background.

Inside is Bulova's High Precision Quartz calibre NP20, running at 262 kHz, roughly eight times a standard quartz frequency, and accurate to within seconds a year. The small seconds ticks in one-second steps, but the central chronograph seconds sweeps when running, which gives the timing display a more mechanical look. The watch comes on a padded brown leather strap with white contrast stitching.

The Bulova Military VWI Special Edition (ref. 96B482) is available now, priced at $695. See more on the Bulova website. (It’s geographically limited so it will show up just for U.S. based readers, the rest will have to google the watch. Sorry about that).

3/

Mido Gives Their Smallest Multifort TV A Rose Gold Colored Case And A Brown Dial

Mido's Multifort TV has always been about that boxy, retro television silhouette that has a lot of presence on the wrist. A couple of months ago, Mido introduced a smaller size aimed squarely at people who want the shape without the presence, the Mido Multifort TV 28mm. Now, they’re expanding that collection to include a new Multifort TV 28 Quartz with a very nice gold colored case and a few diamonds.

The case is rectangular, as you would expect, 28mm wide by 27.6mm long, and just 6.9mm thick. It's 316L stainless steel with a rose gold PVD coating, topped by a sapphire crystal with an anti-reflective layer on the underside. Water resistance is 50 meters, but what do you expect from such a small watch.

The dial is brown with a mix of applied indexes and three diamonds (0.0114 total carat, Top Wesselton, VS-SI clarity, single cut). I usually dislike diamonds on dials, but these seem small enough and contrast the brown dial well to not bug me. There’s a round date aperture at 6 o’clock.

Inside is a quartz movement that I don’t think Mido names, but is likely from the Swatch family. The bracelet is stainless steel with the same rose gold PVD, closed with a butterfly clasp.

The new Mido Multifort TV 28 Quartz is available now, priced at CHF 620. See more on the Mido website.

4/

The Corniche Heritage Chronograph Visage Is A Very Nice Watch If You Find Yourself On The French Riviera

Corniche is not a brand I write a lot about. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned them. Because it’s a shame. They make kind of interesting, very affordable, unique watches. And they lean into the French Riviera theme a lot. Could have been a gimmick, but it isn’t. There’s a new model out, the Heritage Chronograph Visage Limited Edition that plays perfectly into their identity and just might be a great summer watch.

The case is 39mm wide and 11.5mm thick, offered in stainless steel or rose gold PVD. The sapphire crystal gets anti-reflective and anti-fingerprint coatings, and the case flank carries a numbered metal plaque. Water resistance is 50 meters, enough for a pool and not much past it.

The dial is the killer feature here. Corniche used a baby blue ceramic finish they call Visage Blue, and ceramic reflects light in a completely unexpected way. Surrounding the dial is a white tachymeter scale. You get hand-applied Breguet-style numerals, which are interestingly cut with the two white sub-dials. The hands are gold colored, matching the numerals, and the central seconds hand is bright white. Overall, this is a watch that looks great in direct sunlight.

Inside is the Seiko VK64, a hybrid mecha-quartz that uses quartz timekeeping with a mechanical chronograph module. You get grab-and-go accuracy and a proper crisp pusher feel, plus a sweeping central chronograph hand. The strap is a textured Visage Blue rubber with a V-pattern, quick-release bars, and a folding deployant clasp, fitted for wrists from 15.5 to 20cm. The caseback is engraved with a Mediterranean stone pine cone.

The Corniche Heritage Chronograph Visage Limited Edition is limited to 300 pieces, split between steel and rose gold PVD, and it’s still available at a pretty reasonable $525. See more on the Corniche website.

5/

This Is Anton Suhanov's First Balance-Forward Wristwatch, The Flamingo

Anton Suhanov built his name on complicated clocks, including the multi-axis tourbillon work and the St Petersburg Easter Egg clock that took a Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève prize in 2025. But when he does wrist watches, like the Chronotope and the Racer, things get even more interesting. On the new Flamingo, Suhanov implements a concept he calls a "flaming balance," and the whole design bends toward making the regulating organ the most important thing of the watch. And it’s quite effecitve.

The case is 42mm wide and 11.5mm thick, stainless steel with a mix of brushed and polished surfaces. This isn’t the thinnest watch in the world, but that seems like a pretty impressive number given how much architecture is happening underneath the domed sapphire crystal. Around the back, a sapphire caseback is held by six three-point screws, and the crown has tiny rubies set into it. Water resistance is 30 meters.

The dial is where the idea is implemented. It's a sandblasted and brushed brass base treated in rhodium and dark ruthenium, three-dimensional and structured, with a 15.7mm balance wheel sitting right at the top. It beats at 18,000vph and carries three luminescent inserts that, in low light, merge into a single glowing ring. That's the flaming part, and it’s freaking cool. Time is pushed off-centre onto its own dedicated sub-dial, with small seconds at 2 o'clock and a 24-hour indicator at 10. Down at 6 there's a non-linear power reserve that speeds up over the final 12 hours, so you get a more precise indication as the watch winds down. The observatory-style hands are set with ruby elements that look fantastic against the grey base.

Inside is the hand-wound calibre Su26.1L, four years in development and entirely in-house. Twin barrels give it 84 hours of reserve, and the layout is open on purpose, built around a Y-shaped bridge. Finishing includes perlage, Côtes de Genève, and hand-polished inner angles. The strap is a grey alligator with a steel pin buckle shaped like the balance bridge.

The Anton Suhanov Flamingo is limited to 38 pieces, with price on request. I can’t even guess what the price is. See more on the Anton Suhanov website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• What moves Johnny Knoxville, the star of Jackass, to risk his life for our entertainment? This “very serious investigation” involves interviews with friends and family, a surf trip to Malibu, a gag with a fake raccoon, and a stop at In-N-Out.

• First off: This isn’t a Rick Moranis profile. I know you want it to be—we all want it to be—but it’s not. Maybe one day we’ll get the deep, rich look at a man who’s beloved by millions of comedy fans but who also stepped out of the public eye more than 30 years ago. Until then, there’s the fact that Moranis will be part of next year’s Spaceballs sequel, and as such was game enough to show up at San Diego Comic-Con over the weekend (where, predictably, Hall H chaos ensued). Anthony Breznican was there, shadowing the proceedings. Read it at ludicrous speed, obviously.

• Monarch butterfly populations are on the upswing. But, faced with climate change, pine bark beetles, and even avocado-farming cartels, can it last? For The Atlantic, Vann R. Newkirk II follows Cinderella, Eric, and Carle, three butterflies named by his young daughter, as they leave their wintering ground in Mexico to migrate north to lay eggs in order to complete their “biological mission.”

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

I still can’t decide if Penn is the world’s most committed actor or he actually lives this life, but either way, he’s entertaining.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. I’m not a fan of obsessing over a price of a watch, but I think there’s going to be an interesting discussion over what Timex did with their new diver. Go at it!

Every headline satisfies an opinion. Except ours.

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In this issue

• Timex Embraces Serious Divers With The Deepwater Meridian In Titanium, But It’s Going To Ruffle Feathers

• Citizen Keeps Expanding The 37mm Variant Of The Tsuyosa, Now In Gold And Silver

• Hanhart Makes A Sharp Turn With The Square by Square, A Watch Unlike Any They Made Before

• The 36mm Parmigiani Fleurier Tonda PF Gets A Violet Dial, But Only In Singapore

• Roger Dubuis Sends The Knights Of The Round Table On A Visit To Japan’s Edo Castle

👂What’s new

1/

Timex Embraces Serious Divers With The Deepwater Meridian In Titanium, But It’s Going To Ruffle Feathers

Timex has a habit of building more watch than the price suggests, but even they aren’t immune to price creep. Recently, we’ve been seeing them break the €500 mark often, and even go into four figures. But those have usually been limited editions and small experiments. Now, however, we’re getting something interesting. It’s the new Deepwater Meridian 300 HEV, an evolution of the Deepwater Meridian but now done in titanium, with the addition of a helium escape valve. Timex is obviously aiming at Seiko here, with both the format and price. But would you spend almost €1,000 on a Timex diver?

The case is 44mm wide, 15mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 51mm, now made out of Grade 5 titanium instead of steel. That drops weight and improves corrosion resistance. Water resistance climbs from 200 meters to 300 meters, helped by a solid screw-down caseback that replaces the old display back. A unidirectional bezel with a black ceramic insert sits on top, and a brand new helium escape valve sits at 10 o'clock. That’s a move, certainly.

Two dials are available black or pale green. Both have oversized hands and applied markers sized for legibility underwater, and both use Nemoto SG-2200 lume on the hands, markers, and bezel. The green version goes further with a fully lumed dial. With the fully lumed dial it certainly does remind me of another famous affordable diver.

Inside is the Miyota 8215, a 21-jewel automatic running at 3 Hz with roughly 40 hours of reserve. It's not exciting, but it's honest, cheap to service, and hard to kill. The strap is a quick-release UV-resistant HNBR rubber with a pin buckle.

The Timex Deepwater Meridian 300 HEV is available for pre-order now through Timex, with deliveries expected in late November 2026. At €959 for a 300 meter diver with a titanium case and a HEV, even despite the Miyota 8-series movement, it’s not that bad a deal. However, almost €1,000 for a Timex diver in a world where you can get the Deepwater Reef 200 Titanium Automatic with no HEV and just 100 meters of water resistance less (and also a more wearable 41mm) for just over €500 does seem like a tough sell. See more on the Timex website.

2/

Citizen Keeps Expanding The 37mm Variant Of The Tsuyosa, Now In Gold And Silver

The Tsuyosa has been Citizen's instant success story since the moment the first model was released. And no wonder, it’s a good integrated-bracelet sports watch for not much money. The thing is, it was just good, as people wanted a smaller size and a better movement. Recently, they released the 37mm variant, but with the old movement, and a 40mm, but with a new and upgraded movement. Now you don’t have to pick any more, as they’re putting the better movement into the smaller case with the new NK0032-56A.

The case is 37mm wide in stainless steel, here with a full yellow gold-tone coating. Vertical brushing runs across most of the surfaces with a polished smooth bezel. Water resistance is 50 meters, which is fine for a watch built for everyday wear, but 100 would certainly be more welcome.

The dial has the radial three-dimensional texture from the other Tsuyosa 60 models. The base is silver with gold-tone applied markers and matching hands, all lumed, plus the usual date at 3 o'clock.

Inside is Citizen's caliber 8310, an automatic beating at 3 Hz with a 60-hour power reserve. And that’s the main attraction of this release. Previous models came with the caliber 8210 which only had 42 hours of power reserve. You can see the movement through the sapphire caseback, with Geneva stripes, blued screws and a signed rotor. The five-link gold colored bracelet takes its cue from the Jubilee style, alternating brushed and polished links, closed by a butterfly clasp.

The Tsuyosa 60 37mm is available now for $675 through Citizen boutiques and authorised retailers. Quite the price. See more on the Citizen website.

3/

Hanhart Makes A Sharp Turn With The Square by Square, A Watch Unlike Any They Made Before

Hanhart is a German brand you know for pilot's chronographs and fluted red reset buttons, which is why their Aquasphere, a diver released last year, was such a huge surprise. But that was pretty much the same format, in essence. So, imagine the shock when Hanhart casually announced they’re releasing the Square by Square. It comes from a design competition entry — the Dubai Watch Week x Grail Watch contest, where it made the finals in the out-of-the-box shaped-watch category — and it looks like nothing else in the catalogue. Munich designer Marcus Wiedemann pulled proportions and construction ideas from Hanhart's own archive of vintage shaped watches, then reworked them into something rarely seen. Hanhart made six watches, and there’s no indication these will make it to regular production, which they most certainly should. The good news is that they are selling the six.

The steel case is not round, not rectangular, and not quite a cushion. It measures 40mm from 12 to 6, 38mm from 9 to 3, and 10.9mm thick, with a very short lug-to-lug of 32.8mm and short lugs built into the case shape, so it should sit easily on most wrists. Three prototypes get a sandblasted matte case, three a polished one. The sapphire crystal is quite impressive, strongly domed and spilling over the edges of the case. Hanhart says several crystals shattered before they figured out how to make it. Water resistance is 100 meters, and the crown is tucked discreetly onto the side.

The dial is extremely dimensional, tiered, with a deep stepped rehaut framing everythin. Three prototypes come in deep blue with a sunburst finish, three in mother-of-pearl. Applied numerals and indices are done in steel to match the case, precise and technical with no nod to old Hanhart typography. Speaking of typography, these might be the prettiest numerals I’ve seen all year. The hands are skeletonised, multi-faceted, fully polished, and when they meet at 12 they form a long diamond.

Inside is the automatic Sellita SW1000-1 b, a good fit for a slim case, beating at 4 Hz with 18 jewels and a 46-hour power reserve. Strap width is 16mm, with a choice of straps at that narrow lug spacing.

The Hanhart Square by Square is a limited run of six, three blue and three mother-of-pearl, priced at €1,890 including taxes. Great price for a very fun watch. See how to get one on the Hanhart website.

4/

The 36mm Parmigiani Fleurier Tonda PF Gets A Violet Dial, But Only In Singapore

Parmigiani Fleurier keeps mining the Tonda PF for regional exclusives, and with other brands it would get kind of annoying at this point. But the Tonda PF is such a pretty watch that I’ll gladly see thousands of limited variants. This latest is made for Singapore retailer Sincere Fine Watches, using the 36mm variant of the Tonda PF, and comes with a Soft Violet dial.

The case is 36mm wide and only 8.6mm thick, made out of stainless steel with the alternating polished and satin-brushed surfaces that we’ve seen before. The bezel is hand-knurled platinum, which doesn’t convey in pictures how good it looks in real life. Sapphire crystals front and back, screwed-in crown, water-resistant to 100 meters.

The dial has Parmigiani's Grain d'Orge guilloché, a fine barleycorn pattern that catches light and shifts the colour between violet, blue, and lavender depending on the angle. Indices are applied 18ct gold with a rhodium plating, and the delta-shaped hands are skeletonised so they don't fight the dial for attention.

Inside is the in-house calibre PF770, an automatic built specifically to fit this 36mm case, beating at 4 Hz with a 60-hour reserve. Through the sapphire back you see the Côtes de Genève, bevelled bridges, and a skeletonised 22ct rose gold rotor. It comes on a matching steel bracelet with a folding clasp.

The Parmigiani Fleurier Tonda PF Automatic 36mm Soft Violet SHH Edition is sold only through Sincere Fine Watches and SHH at Marina Bay Sands and limited to 50 pieces. Price is set at S$37,650. See more on the SSH website.

5/

Roger Dubuis Sends The Knights Of The Round Table On A Visit To Japan’s Edo Castle

Some 16 years ago, Roger Dubuis introduced the Knights of the Round Table watch, and it’s exactly what you think it is. A massive piece of wrist art that also tells time, but primarily serves as a vessel for incredible miniature work that includes 12 knights sitting around a round table. 16 years of anything is impressive, but 16 years of dedication to this craft is just sensational. Now, we’re getting the new Excalibur The Kabuto Legacy which moves the idea to 17th-century Japan, swapping medieval knights for 12 micro-sculpted samurai helmets ringing an abstract Edo Castle. To keep the history straight, the brand brought in Frederik Cryns, the Japanese history professor who consulted on Shōgun. This is so incredibly cool.

The case is 45mm wide and 16.87mm thick, made out of 18k pink gold, with a dramatically fluted bezel that has a sapphire ring under it, and the signature third central lug all present. Water resistance is 30 meters, which is beside the point on a watch like this but worth pointing out.

The 12 helmets are each hand-engraved from 18k pink gold, modeled on real early-17th-century commanders. And each is very recognizable through the details: Tokugawa Ieyasu's fern crest, Honda Tadakatsu's deer antlers, Date Masamune's crescent moon. At the center sits the Edo Castle, built from 17 separate elements in pink gold, black PVD, and deep blue CVD, the blue inspired by the indigo of samurai textiles. The layering and mix of finishes give you plenty to stare at.

Inside is the in-house calibre RD821, an automatic with a central rotor, Poinçon de Genève certification, 172 components, beating at 4Hz with a 48-hour power reserve. The caseback is framed by a blue-coated pink-gold ring laser-engraved with all 12 crests. The watch ships on a blue calfskin strap with stitched leather tiles meant to echo samurai armour, alongside a second strap and a pink-gold folding buckle with quick release.

The Excalibur The Kabuto Legacy (ref. RDDBEX1139) is limited to 28 pieces, and price is on request. Seeing how previous variants hovered at the CHF 300,000 point, expect this one to be there as well. See more on the Roger Dubuis website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• Emily Wilson is easily the most controversial classicist in the world. Which is an incredibly weird thing to say; who would have thought a classicist could be controversial. Well, she drew the ire of Odyssey fans around the world with her translation of Homer that painted the story and characters in a much different light than previous translations. Nolan hinted during production of his adaptation that a lot of cues were taken from Wilson’s translation. Now, she published her review of the Odyssey movie in the London Review of Books. And if you thought that the fact there is a classicist relevant enough to be controversial was weird, what you might find even more weird is that this review crashed the London Review of Books website yesterday. Wilson panned Nolan.

• Travis Diehl’s feature on “Star Axis,” the half-century project of artist Charles Ross, is transportive, an ideal combination of explanatory and sensory writing. Not all of us will make it to the sparse section of Anton Chico, New Mexico, to ascend the steps of Ross’s pyramid and see the stars reel. For those of us who don’t, Diehl’s piece makes for an elegant consolation prize.

• A finger hovers over “click here,” the promise of pleasure just a tap away—endless feeds, optimized bodies, algorithmic desire. Yet the more we indulge, the duller it all feels. In an age of abundance without satisfaction, genuine pleasure has thinned to a ghost, reshaped by power, profit, and control, even as it remains the thing we cannot stop chasing.

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One video you have to watch today

Lately, I’ve been thinking that the Porsche 928 automatic might be the most underrated car Porsche ever made. Looks like I was right.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. That Lebois & Co's stroopwafel dial brought me back to my Amsterdam days… Pure nostalgia

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In this issue

• The Citizen Continues 50th-Anniversary Celebration With An Eco-Drive In Shibori White

• Hanhart Plunges The Aquasphere Into Darkness With A Matte Black Dial

• Union Glashütte Reaches Back To Legendary German Liveries For The Sachsen Classic, Now In An Averin

• Lebois & Co's New Heritage Atelier Comes With Two Incredible Textured Dials

• Andersen Genève Cools Down the Communication 45 With A Platinum Case

👂What’s new

1/

The Citizen Continues 50th-Anniversary Celebration With An Eco-Drive In Shibori White

Citizen has been marking 50 years of Eco-Drive with a run of anniversary models under The Citizen line, their premium line with the most unfortunate name, and the AQ4090-08A is the latest of bunch. Where the earlier releases leaned sporty on integrated titanium bracelets, this one goes for a more dressy appearance. While the size doesn’t help that dress appearance the dial does play well in the space. It draws on pole-wrap shibori, a Japanese resist-dyeing technique.

The case is 40mm wide and 12.20mm thick in Citizen's Super Titanium, the brand's proprietary alloy that supposed to be more scratch resistant. Even more scratch resistance is done with a Duratect Platinum treatment that also results in a brighter finish, with a sapphire crystal over the dial. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The shibori-inspired texture and pattern of the dial is meant to represent drifting mist, and it shifts as the light moves across it. Blue accents and silver applied markers keep it legible, the hands and markers are lumed, and the textured surface still lets enough light through to feed the cell underneath.

Inside is Citizen's Caliber A060, one of the top Eco-Drive movements, rated to an absurd ±5 seconds per year with a perpetual calendar that sorts out month lengths and leap years on its own. Fully charged, it holds up to 18 months in power-save mode, so battery changes are a non-issue. These The Citizen watches usually come on titanium bracelets, but this one gets a black crocodile strap with a folding clasp.

The Citizen AQ4090-08A is available now, limited to 200 pieces, priced at $2,995. See more on the Citizen website.

2/

Hanhart Plunges The Aquasphere Into Darkness With A Matte Black Dial

Hanhart built its reputation on pilot's watches, so the Aquasphere that was released in 2024 was a bit of a surprise. But the best kind of surprise. This new Matte Black version keeps everything intact and just changes the mood, trading the original's blue for a black and white scheme. It's the restrained take on a watch that already had a strong identity.

The stainless steel case is 42mm wide, 12.95mm thick and 49mm lug-to-lug, unchanged from the other Aquasphere models. Satin-brushed, polished and matte surfaces alternate across the case, which keeps a fairly plain shape from looking flat. The black bezel turns unidirectionally through 60 clicks and has a black ceramic insert with Hanhart's stencil numerals and a red marker at 12. Water resistance is 300 meters, with a guarded screw-down crown, a helium escape valve at 10 o'clock, and a caseback engraved with an underwater scene.

The dial is now matte black with a silver rehaut surrounding it. Applied markers, Arabic numerals at 12, and broad hands are all filled with Super-LumiNova C1, and the central seconds hand gets a red tip, as you would expect from a Hanhart.

Inside is either a Sellita SW200-1 or a Soprod P024 depending on the batch, both running at 4 Hz with hacking seconds and at least 38 hours of reserve. Hanhart regulates every movement in Gütenbach to 0/+8 seconds per day across six positions, which is a tighter spec than the price suggests. Three wearing options are available: a black elastic Hook Strap, an FKM rubber strap with a folding clasp, or a steel bracelet with tool-free micro-adjustment and quick-release spring bars.

The Hanhart Aquasphere Matte Black is available now at €1,540 on the Hook Strap, €1,640 on rubber and €1,740 on the bracelet. See more on the Hanhart website.

3/

Union Glashütte Reaches Back To Legendary German Liveries For The Sachsen Classic, Now In An Averin

Every year Union Glashütte releases a limited edition for the Sachsen Classic, the historic car rally it sponsors, and every year that watch has been the retro Noramis Chronograph. For the 23rd running of the rally, on 14 and 15 August 2026, the brand has switched horses. The tribute now goes to the Averin Chronograph, and given that watch's angular square case and dashboard-style dial, the motorsport connection is even stronger than on the round Noramis.

The steel case remains unchanged from the standard Averin: 41mm by 41mm, a substantial 15.45mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 49.47mm. Brushed and polished surfaces play off the sharp geometry, and the domed box-style sapphire follows the square footprint for a very retro and somewhat familiar look. The crown sits between two rectangular pushers, there's a sapphire caseback, and water resistance is 100 meters.

The dial is the novelty here. It's a white embossed tile pattern crossed with bold stripes in signal red, Nardo grey and Daytona grey, pulled from historic racing liveries. The square subregisters, small seconds at 9 o'clock and a 30-minute counter at 3 o'clock, keep the instrument-panel logic going, and the central chronograph seconds hand is lacquered bright red. Nickel-plated hour and minute hands get Super-LumiNova inserts, and the date sits at 6 o'clock.

Inside is the calibre UNG-27.S2, Union Glashütte's automatic chronograph built on the Valjoux 7750. This one is the cam-operated version with a silicon balance spring and stop-seconds, running at 4Hz with a power reserve of at least 65 hours. Two straps come in the box, both on a quick-change system: a bright red rubber strap and a grey perforated leather racing strap with red lining.

The Averin Chronograph Sachsen Classic 2026 is limited to 350 numbered pieces, priced at EUR 3,700. See more on the Union Glashütte website.

4/

Lebois & Co's New Heritage Atelier Comes With Two Incredible Textured Dials

Lebois & Co is certainly not a household name at this point, and since it’s often overlooked, you can find some pretty amazing surpirses from the brand. For example, this new Heritage Atelier collection which comes with two of the best dials at this price point. And of course they are amazing… they are made in collaboration with the legends at GT Cadrans, one finished in a Clous de Paris pattern and the other made to look like a Dutch stroopwafel. Why don’t we have more stroopwafel dials? They’re so fun.

The 316L stainless steel case that the two models share measures 37.80mm wide and 10.50mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 45.50mm. Polished and brushed surfaces, a double-domed sapphire crystal, a sapphire exhibition caseback, and 50 meters of water resistance make it a compelling package.

Both share the same layout: applied Breguet numerals, leaf hands, and a recessed small seconds sub-dial at 6 o'clock, framed by a contrasting silver railroad minute track. The Clous de Paris dial is CNC diamond-cut and then given a galvanic 24-carat gold treatment for a warm rose-toned surface. The Stroopwafel dial is laser-engraved to reproduce that woven waffle texture and finished in a caramel galvanic tone. Both catch light and shift as you move your wrist, and the Stroopwafel in particular looks like nothing else out there right now.

Powering both is the calibre LC-350, a COSC-certified automatic built on the Sellita SW360-1. It beats at 4Hz with a 56-hour power reserve. The watches come on brushed grey suede straps.

The Heritage Atelier Small Seconds Clous de Paris and Stroopwafel will be available during a limited ordering window that opens today and lasts for 14 days. Price is set at €5,500. See more on the Lebois & Co website.

5/

Andersen Genève Cools Down the Communication 45 With A Platinum Case

Svend Andersen is one of those independents whose name deserves an extreme amount of respect. A founding member of the AHCI, he opened his atelier in 1980 after repairing original Louis Cottier worldtime mechanisms at Gübelin and later restoring them inside Patek Philippe's Grand Complications workshop. That work became his specialty, and the Communication 24 of 1990 built the brand around it. Last year Andersen marked the 45th anniversary of that original with the yellow gold Communication 45. It now comes back in platinum.

The case is 38mm wide and 8.95mm thick, with the classic two-crown Cottier architecture. It’s made by hand by Marco Poluzzi in his La Chaux-de-Fonds workshop, owned by Andersen since 2022, without CNC machinery. The soldered lugs mix teardrop and cow-horn shapes, a nod to the earliest models and to Cottier's own worldtimers. At this size and thickness it wears like a proper dress watch. You get 30 meters of water resistance.

The dial is made out of 21ct BlueGold, with the house's wave-form tapisserie guilloché, cut on a 19th-century machine. The world map, offered in three versions centering Asia, Europe, or America, is filled with liquid unalloyed gold. The city ring is brushed to a silvery-white, and the 24-hour ring is blue for the night hours. Openwork hands point out the time.

Inside is a vintage A. Schild automatic base, restored and re-decorated, the same base Andersen uses in the Celestial Voyager, the Asprey Heures du Monde, and the Tempus Terrae. It beats at 3Hz with 40 hours of power reserve and is paired to the latest version of the in-house worldtime module Svend first designed in the 1980s. The rotor is light blue BlueGold with the same guilloché as the dial. It comes on a dark blue suede strap.

The Andersen Genève Communication 45 Platinum is a limited edition of 45, split into 15 pieces per dial variant, priced at CHF 54,800. See more on the Andersen Genève website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• For Offrange, Mitch Hagney educates us on how tomatoes ripen naturally and unnaturally, and how Big Tomato forces the issue in huge warehouses by pumping in ethylene gas. It might just inspire you to grow your own.

• Every adult who purports to care about a free press should read at least one story about the frustrating hurdles and bad-faith nitpicking confronted by student journalists (and their advisors). Earlier this year, a young reporter for the Redwood High School Bark found a few local references in the US Department of Justice’s public files concerning Jeffrey Epstein, the sex offender who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. Soon, the high school faced legal threats, and administrators grew concerned that students had published inaccurate information. Ara Rosenthal tells the story of the steady, diligent young journalists who weathered the worries and pressures of the adults around them—and kept their story intact.

• When Steven Judy was executed for rape and murder in 1981, he was little more to the public than a monster. To Traci and Randy Carr, he was something else: a hero and a protector. After all, he was their foster brother. For The Guardian, Masha Hamilton—who covered the Judy trial as a young reporter more than 45 years ago—returns to Indiana to meet the Carrs, and to take the measure of the hole rent in their lives by Judy’s actions and disappearance.

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One video you have to watch today

I love the Speeed channel and I love it when non watch people talk about watches. It’s good to take a step back.

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Thanks for reading,
Vuk

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Have a nice weekend everybody, hope you enjoy the Traska review.

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In this issue

• Casio Strips the Pro Trek Down to Three Hands And Proves We Need More Hiking Watches

• Nivada Grenchen Brings A Bunch Of New Dials To The Chronoking Racing With The New Racing II

• Ba111od Gives The Skeletonized Chapter 7 A Natural Stainless Steel Look

• The Sartory-Billard SB04-E Nuances Could Be The Brand's First Real Daily Wearer

• Ulysse Nardin Puts the Solar System On Your Wrist In The Rose Gold Blast Moonstruck

• IAT REVEIW: The Traska Venturer GMT Is What Happens When A Watch Has Everything But A Past

👂What’s new

1/

Casio Strips the Pro Trek Down to Three Hands And Proves We Need More Hiking Watches

I've long thought there should be more hiking watches. Hiking is pretty much the most accessible outdoor activity there is, requiring no gear beyond shoes and a willingness to walk uphill, and yet the watch world mostly offers you either a plain field watch or a full sensor-loaded expedition computer with nothing sensible in between. Sure, of course, you can hike with your JLC Reverso if you so please, but let’s pretend we need purpose-built tools to walk around in nature. The Casio Pro Trek PRJ-01 fills that gap. It's the first fully analog Pro Trek, dropping the digital display and the Triple Sensor package that has defined the line for decades in favor of three hands and a date.

The resin case measures 39.10mm wide and 11.60mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 44.40mm, which makes this one of the smallest Pro Treks Casio has ever built. Water resistance is 100 meters, the crystal is mineral glass, and the case back is resin. The rotating bezel is very cool. In its default position it gives the watch an angular, geometric profile, but turn it and it shifts a protective wall around the crown. The markings also let you work out rough direction using the sun, and I’m a fan of low-tech navigation aids.

The dial on all three models is a milky white with central hours, minutes, and seconds, and a date window kind of awkwardly hanging there at 4:30. Neobrite covers both the dial and hands, which means that the entire thing lights up. Each of the three references has its own accent color: yellow on the black PRJ-01-1, blue on the black PRJ-01AE-8, and orange on the white PRJ-01AE-7.

Inside is module 5548, a solar-powered quartz calibre, with roughly five months of running time from a full charge and a low battery warning. All three come on a resin NATO-style strap that passes under the case, matching the case color. The AE versions add a textile carabiner attachment so you can clip the watch to a pack or a belt loop, which is something that more watches should have.

Now, for some bad news. Currently, the Casio PRJ-01 is sold only in Japan, but sources they will go worldwide with them. Price is $157 for the PRJ-01-1 and the two AE references are around $194. I love these, I want these. See more on the Casio website.

2/

Nivada Grenchen Brings A Bunch Of New Dials To The Chronoking Racing With The New Racing II

Last September I told you I'd have to buy the green Chronoking Racing, and I stand by that. I still haven’t bought one because the list of stuff I have to buy is getting super long. However, in the meantime, Nivada Grenchen released the new Chronoking Racing Collection which is either good news or an expensive problem. This is a collection that was made with input from Nivada buyers that got a chance to vote on their favorite colors.

The case carries over unchanged. Stainless steel, 38mm wide and 13mm thick, brushed and polished, with pump pushers and a signed fluted crown. It's a well-proportioned vintage chronograph case and 100 meters of water resistance is more than welcome. On top sits the interchangeable bezel system, and every watch ships with all five bezels regardless of which dial you pick. This time they carry the City Track design, a 60-minute scale paired with 12 city names for time zones.

While the interchangeable bezels are cool, those dials are the show stoppers. Five pretty wild colorways are available: black with burgundy, black with blue, a monochrome blue, a green and an ice blue. They all share the same setup, with three recessed registers, running seconds at six, a 60-minute chronograph counter at nine and a 24-hour indicator at three, all with the square-tipped exotic markers inside them. Nivada Grenchen also widened the chapter ring, simplified the hour markers down to plain applied batons and slimmed the central chronograph hand.

Inside is the Seiko VK63 mecaquartz, which you already knew by that stupid 24-hour indicator, quartz for the timekeeping and a mechanical chronograph module for the stopwatch. Straps are a beads-of-rice steel bracelet with a folding clasp or a black perforated leather strap on a pin buckle.

The Nivada Grenchen Chronoking Racing II is available now, €640 on the leather strap and €840 on the bracelet. See more on the Nivada website.

3/

Ba111od Gives The Skeletonized Chapter 7 A Natural Stainless Steel Look

BA111OD launched the Chapter 7 Skeleton back in May, and, curiously, they only launched it in an anthracite PVD finish, with no silver option. It wasn’t a bad move, far from it, but it was a bit unusual. Well, they just fixed that with the new Chapter 7 Skeleton with the anthracite PVD taken off. Nothing else has changed. Same case, same movement, same openworked dial, just brushed and polished steel instead of a dark coating.

The case is 316L stainless steel at 40mm wide, with vertical brushing across the flat surfaces and polished facets picking out the edges. There’s a sapphire crystal with antireflective coating up top, a display caseback below, and the crown sits at 4 o'clock engraved with the BA111OD emblem, as the brand is known to do. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The dial is openworked and arranged to put the movement on display, with vertical brushing and polished bevels on the bridges and a sandblasted texture filling the space between the indexes. Removing the PVD changes the look completely, and it’s a much brighter overall look.

Inside is the Soprod P024, a skeletonised automatic with 38 hours of power reserve and a 4Hz beat rate. Two strap choices are available: an integrated stainless steel bracelet with tool-free micro-adjustment, or a frost blue rubber strap.

The new Ba111od Chapter 7 Skeleton can be ordered now, but deliveries are expected in mid-August. Price on the rubber strap is €1,125 and on the steel bracelet it’s €1,195. See more on the Ba111od website.

4/

The Sartory-Billard SB04-E Nuances Could Be The Brand's First Real Daily Wearer

Sartory-Billard has spent most of its existence in the bespoke business, letting customers pick materials and shades until the watch was theirs alone. But that’s complicated, for both the manufacturer and often for the client that sometimes just wants an off the shelf watch without much fuss. And Sartory-Billard acknowledges that with the new SB04-E Nuances, which keeps things simple and brings them the closes to making a straightforward daily wearer.

The case is stainless steel measuring 39.5mm wide and 10.2mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 44mm and alternating polished and brushed surfaces. Those are good numbers, and the thickness in particular deserves credit given how many independents land closer to 12mm with a comparable movement inside. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The dial is slightly concave, sunray brushed, with a very slight fumé gradient that darkens toward the edge. Applied numerals replace the sapphire disc used on earlier SB04-E models. The typography was drawn for the brand by Simon Schmidt (it shows that they put effort into it) and the polished concave hands take their shape from a fountain pen nib, filled with Super-LumiNova. Three colors are available at launch: red, green and blue, and I assume more will folow. And you still get the cool sector dividers and railroad track scale on the edge of the dial.

Inside is the La Joux-Perret G101A, beating at 4Hz, with 68 hours of power reserve. No date, which suits the dial. You get a choice of colour-matched rubber strap with a pin buckle or a steel bracelet with alternating brushed and polished links, closed with a three-fold clasp.

The SB04-E Nuances is available now, priced at €3,600 without tax on rubber and €3,800 without tax on the bracelet. First deliveries start October 2026. See more on the Sartory-Billard website.

5/

Ulysse Nardin Puts the Solar System On Your Wrist In The Rose Gold Blast Moonstruck

Ludwig Oechslin's astronomical watches for Ulysse Nardin are the rare complications that actually work as instruments rather than as party tricks. Sure, technically, they still are party tricks because no one truly needs to be tracking celestial objects with their wristwatch, but they are also incredible works of art. One such example is the Astrolabium Galileo Galilei in 1985, then the Planetarium Copernicus and Tellurium Johannes Kepler, and in 2009 the first Moonstruck, which condensed the Earth-Sun-Moon relationship into one display you can read without a manual. The new Blast Moonstruck in rose gold is that same calibre wrapped in the Blast case, limited to 20 examples.

The case is 45mm wide, and being made out of 18k rose gold, you’ll know when you’re wearing this watch. But to cut down on weight, UN makes the case middle and bezel out of black DLC titanium. Not sure how much that helps, but would you care with a thing this impressive? The upper case mixes satin and polished surfaces with laser-cut facets. That bezel is almost non-existent because the entire front is taken up by a pretty spectacular box-shaped crystal that sits on top of the case. Interestingly, you even get 30 meters of water resistance.

That sapphire glass box was developed to accommodate the movement, but it’s also part of the main attraction of the watch — it features an engraving of the Northern Hemisphere, as seen from the north pole, on its underside and it’s a pretty spectacular look. Below it is a beautiful aventurine glass dial that mimics the night sky. A rotating 24-hour disc carries a bronzite Sun indication with a two-tone day/night display, working against a fixed city ring for world time. The Moon tracks its own orbital path around the globe, showing phase and position in the lunar month, and the lit portion of the Moon always faces the Sun exactly as it does in the sky. That last detail is an Oechslin signature. The relative Sun and Moon positions also drive the tidal coefficient reading, so you can see spring and neap tides coming. The moonphase is accurate to one day of drift over 40.3 years. A rose gold ring engraved with the days of the month runs around the outside

The calibre UN-106 is Ulysse Nardin's in-house automatic, 338 parts and 42 jewels, beating at 4 Hz with a 50 hour power reserve. It uses a silicon escapement and silicon hairspring, made in-house at SIGATEC, which the brand introduced with the Freak back in 2001. Local time jumps forward and backward in one-hour steps via case-side pushers. Everything else sets from the crown. It comes on a black alligator strap with a folding clasp in black DLC titanium and rose gold.

The Blast Moonstruck in rose gold, reference 1065-400LE-2A-BLACK/1A, is limited to 20 examples, priced at €102,600. Yes, this is completely insane to say, but that seems like a pretty good deal. See more on the Ulysse Nardin website.

IAT REVEIW: The Traska Venturer GMT Is What Happens When A Watch Has Everything But A Past

There's a shop about fifteen minutes from where I live that sells nothing but reproduction furniture. Not actual knock-offs, but chairs that look like they came out of a Danish workshop in 1958, sideboards with proper taper on the legs, the right walnut, the correct proportions. The man who runs it makes most of it himself, and he's very good. A few years ago I asked him why he didn't just put his own name on the things and sell them as his own designs, because frankly some of them are better executed than the originals. He laughed and said that nobody wants a chair by a guy from Zagreb. They want a chair by a dead Dane.
I've thought about that conversation a lot since, mostly because it explains the watch industry in a nutshell.

Consider what you're actually buying when you buy a watch above a certain price. You're buying a case, a dial, a movement, and a bracelet, and every one of those things has a production cost that can be calculated to the cent. Some are more expensive to make, others less. Then you're buying the other thing. The thing that isn't on the spec sheet. A story about a mountain, or a moon landing, or a race in the desert, or a diver in 1953 who needed to know how long he had left in the water. Sometimes that story is true. Sometimes it's been sanded down and polished by four decades of marketing until it barely resembles what happened. It doesn't much matter, because it’s always a story. It's the reason a steel sports watch with a date window can command a five-figure sum and a waiting list, and it's the reason another steel sports watch with a date window, built to the same standard or better, sits on a shelf.
That gap between the two is the most interesting economic feature of this hobby, and it has a name: heritage. Which brings me to a small brand in Florida, and a watch I've been wearing for the past couple of days.
Traska has been around since 2018, founded by Jon Mack, and the entire operating philosophy is visible in the product line if you follow it closely enough. The brand does not blow up its designs and start over. It revises. A case gets reworked, a bracelet gets better, a dial gets simplified, and the watch that emerges is recognizably the same watch, just better than it was. This is exactly what Rolex has done for seventy years, and it's the least glamorous strategy in watchmaking, which is presumably why so few small brands have the discipline for it. Put aside whatever emotions you might have for the Crown, but it’s a fact that their consistency in evolution is unparalleled.

What I liked about the Venturer specifically was that it refused to be another GMT-Master tribute. Instead of a bidirectional 24-hour bezel around the outside, Traska put the second time zone scale on an internal rotating ring, controlled by a second crown. Same functionality, completely different apperance. In a category where roughly nine out of 10 releases are working from the same 1954 template, that’s nice to see.
So the new Venturer GMT arrives with a specific problem to solve, which is that the old one was already very good. The changes here are borrowed from two other Traska projects: the Chronograph, which was a genuine departure for the brand, and a Jump Hour model that Mack and designer Max Resnick have been finalizing. Both are attempts to build a visual language that belongs to Traska rather than to the general vocabulary of mid-century sports watches. The Venturer is where that language gets applied to an existing product for the first time and makes it their own.

Read the entire review here.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• When we think of the ancient world, Greece and Rome usually come to mind, with perhaps a smattering of Cleopatra and Egypt thrown in. This is true not only for the general public but for scholars too, who have tended to keep a narrow focus on these cultures. But, as Carlos Noreña reports, we are on the brink of an exciting shift that explores the patterns of connectivity and exchange that shaped a truly global ancient world. After all, when eighth‑century Central Asian silver vessels turn up in an archaeological dig in Scotland, you have to broaden your view.

• People are choosing cremation far more often these days. Open-casket funerals are on a steep decline, along with the professions that allow for loved ones to comfortably view their dead for the last time. For Harper’s Magazine, John Semley talks to Anthony Saldivar, Berri Cooper, Danielle Colquitt, and Hannah Bugos, all of whom competed in the Restorative Art Technical Showcase, “the highlight event of last year’s National Funeral Directors Association convention.” These elite undertakers are highly skilled in what’s known as restorative art, the process by which humans disfigured by grievous injury or disease are made to look like they did in life, so that their loved ones can bid farewell to someone they recognize.

• The peg for Robert Zaretsky’s essay on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot feels flimsy: “the 70th anniversary of its American premiere,” which lagged the show’s proper premiere, in Paris, by three years. Disregard the peg; as Zaretsky makes clear, there’s not a bad time, these days, to consider Beckett’s best-known work, a demonstration of “solidarity and compassion” set against a “featureless, colorless vista.” The stage directions for Godot have Estragon, one of the play’s leads, look out into the auditorium as an extension of the devastation. “Inspiring prospects,” he says. Let’s hope so.

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Vuk

There's a shop about fifteen minutes from where I live that sells nothing but reproduction furniture. Not actual knock-offs, but chairs that look like they came out of a Danish workshop in 1958, sideboards with proper taper on the legs, the right walnut, the correct proportions. The man who runs it makes most of it himself, and he's very good. A few years ago I asked him why he didn't just put his own name on the things and sell them as his own designs, because frankly some of them are better executed than the originals. He laughed and said that nobody wants a chair by a guy from Zagreb. They want a chair by a dead Dane.

I've thought about that conversation a lot since, mostly because it explains the watch industry in a nutshell.

Consider what you're actually buying when you buy a watch above a certain price. You're buying a case, a dial, a movement, and a bracelet, and every one of those things has a production cost that can be calculated to the cent. Some are more expensive to make, others less. Then you're buying the other thing. The thing that isn't on the spec sheet. A story about a mountain, or a moon landing, or a race in the desert, or a diver in 1953 who needed to know how long he had left in the water. Sometimes that story is true. Sometimes it's been sanded down and polished by four decades of marketing until it barely resembles what happened. It doesn't much matter, because it’s always a story. It's the reason a steel sports watch with a date window can command a five-figure sum and a waiting list, and it's the reason another steel sports watch with a date window, built to the same standard or better, sits on a shelf.

That gap between the two is the most interesting economic feature of this hobby, and it has a name: heritage. Which brings me to a small brand in Florida, and a watch I've been wearing for the past couple of days.

Traska has been around since 2018, founded by Jon Mack, and the entire operating philosophy is visible in the product line if you follow it closely enough. The brand does not blow up its designs and start over. It revises. A case gets reworked, a bracelet gets better, a dial gets simplified, and the watch that emerges is recognizably the same watch, just better than it was. This is exactly what Rolex has done for seventy years, and it's the least glamorous strategy in watchmaking, which is presumably why so few small brands have the discipline for it. Put aside whatever emotions you might have for the Crown, but it’s a fact that their consistency in evolution is unparalleled.

What I liked about the Venturer specifically was that it refused to be another GMT-Master tribute. Instead of a bidirectional 24-hour bezel around the outside, Traska put the second time zone scale on an internal rotating ring, controlled by a second crown. Same functionality, completely different apperance. In a category where roughly nine out of 10 releases are working from the same 1954 template, that’s nice to see.

So the new Venturer GMT arrives with a specific problem to solve, which is that the old one was already very good. The changes here are borrowed from two other Traska projects: the Chronograph, which was a genuine departure for the brand, and a Jump Hour model that Mack and designer Max Resnick have been finalizing. Both are attempts to build a visual language that belongs to Traska rather than to the general vocabulary of mid-century sports watches. The Venturer is where that language gets applied to an existing product for the first time and makes it their own.

The Venturer GMT is 38.5mm wide, 12.1mm thick including the box-style double-domed sapphire, with a lug-to-lug of 46.1mm. Water resistance is 150 meters. The case is 316L stainless steel, brushed on the flanks with polished chamfers, and the whole thing (case and bracelet both) gets a surface hardening treatment that takes it to 1,200 Vickers. I’ve never paid much attention to these hardening treatments and I never understood why people were so obsessed with sapphire crystals that can be smacked against gates. I was just couldn’t relate because I have never, ever smacked my watch into a doorway. Well, that streak came to an end with the Traska. We were throwing a party for my wife’s 40th and I was running around getting everything ready, wearing the borrowed Traska, when I caught the watch onto a very roughly finished outside wall of the house. The sound was horrific and I knew I was toast. I brought my wrist up and there it was: a massive gash across half the lug and the entirety of the bracelet. There was a bunch of material dug up from the watch around the scratch and I was devastated. I wiped the debris off and it felt weird under my finger. It wasn’t metal, it felt like ground up rock. Turns out, the watch took out a chunk of my wall, without leaving even a microscopic scratch on the wall. I appreciate that, Traska.

The shape is broadly what it was, but the flanks now carry polished concave cutouts that run into the lower portion of the bezel, and the lugs have been reprofiled with more curvature and slightly wider spacing. My first instinct on seeing photos was that the lugs had been shortened, and the lug-to-lug measurement says otherwise. Lug width has gone from 20mm to 21mm, which is a small number, but now the case looks less top-heavy, and the bracelet has more presence. I like the look, I’m not sure how practical it is, as I look at my massive box of 20mm straps and small envelope of 21mm straps.

The previous generation had polished case sides. The brushed-with-chamfers treatment on this one is a better look. Polished flanks flare and blow out in bright light. Brushed flanks with a polished bevel catch a line of light along the edge and let the rest of the case hold its shape.

The dial is available in Carbon Black, Bottle Green, Arctic White, or Steel Blue, all lacquered and glossy. I had the black which, while perfectly fine with a very deep color, is the last one I would pick. Although, I can’t say whether I would rather have the green or the blue. It’s hard to argue that the blue isn’t one of the best looking watches in the market right now.

Traska reorganized the dial in three ways. The internal 24-hour bezel is slightly larger in diameter now, which makes the scale easier to read from an angle. The applied hour markers have been moved inside the minute track rather than sitting within a ring of it, which opens the dial up and makes the watch look larger than its 38.5mm. And the date window is no longer a framed rectangle but a diamond-cut circular aperture, with a date wheel color-matched to the dial and a small applied marker below it so the index set reads as complete. This has got to be my favorite update, as I’m not that fond of date apertures. This one blends in completely and I never hated it during my time with it. Everything is filled with white Super-LumiNova BGW9, including the markings on the inner bezel.

Inside is the Miyota 9075, unchanged from the previous generation, and there's no reason it should have changed. It's a flyer-style GMT, which is the configuration you want: the 12-hour hand jumps independently in one-hour increments while the 24-hour hand tracks home time against the inner bezel. Twenty-four jewels, 4Hz beat rate, 42-hour power reserve, hacking seconds. Traska regulates each one in four positions to -10/+20 seconds per day, and that sure proves true.

Operation is straightforward. Unscrew the crown at 3, first position jumps the local hour, second position sets everything with the seconds hacked. The second crown at 10 is also screw-down and drives the internal bezel; you unscrew it, rotate to where you want it, then push and turn to lock. The lock is a nice touch, since an internal bezel you can knock out of position is worse than no bezel at all.

The bracelet is the one Traska developed for the Chronograph, and it's super cool. Three rows, 21mm tapering to 16mm, with smaller and rounder links than the old Oyster-style item, plus polished chamfers wrapping the outer edges. Screwed links, and the same branded fold-over clasp with a toolless micro-adjustment system, which means sizing takes about ninety seconds and dialing it in on a hot day takes about two. It's softer on the wrist than the outgoing bracelet and it looks considerably more expensive.

But the most impressive thing about this watch is the most unremarkable thing — wearing it every day. This is one of the most comfortable, most unassuming and most enjoyable watches I’ve worn in a while. Sure, I’m mostly in love with strange and loud watches, but every now and again you want a simple watch, one that isn’t a burden. And that’s what exactly what this Traska does, and does incredibly perfectly. This is a watch when you need a watch that covers everything.

The new Venturer GMT is €847 (I think this is with my 25% VAT included), up roughly €100 from the previous generation. I’ve seen people complain that the price is way too high now, and there’s no denying that over the life of the Venturer GMT the price has crept up. The thing is, it justifies the creep.

Back to the furniture shop. What Traska has built here is a watch with a well-considered case, an unusual and legible dial layout, a genuinely good bracelet with a clasp mechanism that some four-figure Swiss watches still can't be bothered to match, a regulated flyer GMT movement, 150 meters of water resistance, and a hardness treatment that means it will still look like this in three years. Assemble that same list of attributes in Geneva or Biel, attach a name with sixty years of advertising behind it, and you would not be looking at a price under a thousand dollars. You would be looking at something with a decimal point in a different place, and a waiting list, and a used market where people pay over retail for the privilege.

The difference is heritage. That's it. That's the whole gap. A story, and the decades of accumulated repetition that turned the story into something people will pay for. It is not a fake thing (heritage is real, and the watches that have it earned it in ways that mattered), but it is a separate thing from what the object in front of you actually is, and it's worth being clear-eyed about which one you're paying for.

Here's the part I keep coming back to, though. Heritage is not a fixed quantity that the industry finished distributing in 1969. It gets made. Somebody at Rolex in 1954 was a person at a company making a watch for airline pilots, and nothing about that Tuesday felt like history. The stories accrue afterward, out of consistency, out of doing the same thing well enough for long enough that people start noticing the pattern and telling each other about it.

Which is what Traska is doing. Eight years in, iterating rather than reinventing, building a design language that will be recognizable on sight, refusing to chase whatever the market did last quarter. That is how you build the thing that everyone else already has. It takes decades. So buy the Venturer GMT now, while the only thing you're paying for is the watch.

More at Traska’s website.

-Vuk

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. I'm glad Instagram reminded me of Elliot Brown, I should pay more attention to the brand.  

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In this issue

• Hamilton Adds Green And Blue Dials To The Khaki Field Power Reserve

• Grand Seiko's SBGA529 Peach Blossom Is Exclusive Three Times Over

• The Elliot Brown Arne Cali Collection Are Four Field Watches That Are Way More Fun Than You Expect

• Bianchet Wraps The Beautiful Rotondo UltraFino In Rose Gold

• The Moser Endeavour Minute Repeater Cylindrical Tourbillon Skeleton Cosmic Rain Has Quite A Name

👂What’s new

1/

Hamilton Adds Green And Blue Dials To The Khaki Field Power Reserve

Hamilton has spent years pulling the Khaki Field in every direction at once: faithful reissues, automatics, bigger cases, smaller cases. The Power Reserve sits in the odd middle of all that, taking the hand-wound field watch and bolting a fuel gauge onto it. Last year we got the watch with black and white dials. Now we are getting two more dials, green and blue. A significant improvement over the launch colors.

The stainless steel case is 40mm wide and stays under 12mm thick, which puts it between the 38mm and 42mm Khaki Field Mechanical. The lug-to-lug is 48mm, which is just on the cusp of being too long, so this is the kind of watch most people will want to try on before buying. The case has a fully sandblasted finish. Out back is a screwed solid caseback, up top is a sapphire crystal with AR coating, and water resistance is 100 meters.

The green is a matte olive that’s just the perfect shade. The blue is a lighter mid-blue, less austere. Both keep the collection's core layout: large Arabic hour numerals, a minute track, and a 13-24 hour track in the centre of the dial. Hands and triangular markers are filled with Old Radium Super-LumiNova. The power reserve gauge sits at 9 o'clock with red F and E markings and its own small lumed triangular hand. A power reserve on a field watch is a strange thing to have, but on a hand-wound movement it kind of makes sense.

Inside is the Hamilton calibre H-23, a variant of the Powermatic 80 architecture. It beats at 3Hz, has 80 hours of power reserve, and uses a Nivachron balance spring for magnetic resistance. Each dial comes on a matching green or blue NATO strap with leather loops, and a quick-release sandblasted steel bracelet is offered as an alternative.

On the strap the Khaki Field Power Reserve is priced at €915; on the bracelet it's €995. See more on the Hamilton website.

2/

Grand Seiko's SBGA529 Peach Blossom Is Exclusive Three Times Over

Brands have a few levers to pull when they want a watch to feel more exclusive. Limited production is one. Regional exclusivity is another. Boutique exclusivity is a third. Grand Seiko just pulled all three levels for the Spring Drive Peach Blossom 62GS SBGA529, a run of 30 watches sold only in the US, and within the US only at the Grand Seiko Boutique at Lenox Square in Atlanta, run by Reeds Jewelers. Doesn’t get harder to get than this.

The case is made out of titanium, 40mm wide and 12.8mm thick, part of the 62GS line that traces back to Grand Seiko's first automatic from 1967. The line is known for its apparent lack of bezel, with the crystal emerging from the case. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The dial is a pale pink, meant to echo the peach blossoms of Hanamomo no Sato, a village in Nagano that fills with cultivated peach trees and draws crowds every spring for the bloom. A soft frosted texture stands in for the petals, and it looks lovely. Central dauphine hands point out the time, with a date window at 3 o'clock and a power reserve indicator at 8.

Inside is the Spring Drive calibre 9R65, good for 72 hours of reserve and rated to +/-15 seconds a month. Spring Drive runs a conventional mainspring through a quartz regulator, so you get quartz-grade accuracy with the charm of a mechanical watch. The watch comes on a matching titanium bracelet with a three-fold clasp.

The Spring Drive Peach Blossom 62GS SBGA529 is limited to 30 pieces, available only at the Grand Seiko Boutique Lenox Square in Atlanta, priced at $7,600. See more on the Grand Seiko website.

3/

The Elliot Brown Arne Cali Collection Are Four Field Watches That Are Way More Fun Than You Expect

I don't cover Elliot Brown enough, and I should. They're a British brand that mostly deals in stealth black, gunmetal, and desert drab military tool watches, which is exactly why the new Arne Cali collection caught me by surprise in the best possible way. These are four limited-edition field watches themed around California culture, all bright pastels and swirls and gradients. It's the last thing you'd expect from these guys, and that's the whole appeal.

The base is the Arne field watch, 38mm wide and 12.8mm thick in stainless steel, with a screw-down crown and 200 meters of water resistance. Those are some pretty good measurements and stats, which make the Arne a very nice watch. The water resistance comes as a nice surprise, as so many field watches limit their water resistance to 100 meters, and the Arne Cali doubles that.

Each dial uses a California display, Roman numerals above the 3-to-9 axis and Arabic below, a layout that started life on tool watches because the mixed numerals tell you which way is up when you're reading the thing at an awkward angle. There are four dial options. The Phantom Horizon (606-007) reworks an aircraft attitude indicator into sky blue and grass green split by a red-orange horizon line, the colors inspired by the Golden Gate Bridge. The Ocean Ombré (606-008) is a purple-blue Pacific sunset gradient, the simplest and most obvious of the four, made even more attractive by the pink rehaut.. The Woodie (606-009) has a wooden dial nodding to the wood-panelled surf wagons, and it's the only one that has a gold PVD case. The Psychedelic Trip (606-010) is a tie-dye spiral of orange, yellow, and blues that radiates out from the logo instead of the center hands, so the whole thing reads deliberately off-kilter. Obviously my favorite.

Inside every watch is a Ronda calibre 715 Swiss quartz, hours, minutes, and seconds. All four come on a sailcloth strap.

Each reference is limited to 75 pieces. Price for three of the watches sits at £395, the same as the standard Arne, while the Woodie bumps up the price to £525, due to the wooden dial and gold PVD case. See more on the Elliot Brown website.

4/

Bianchet Wraps The Beautiful Rotondo UltraFino In Rose Gold

I’ve covered Bianchet a few times, usually with a bit of a raised eyebrow at their unique designs and significant prices. But the more I got to meet the brand, the more I got to meet the family behind Bianchet, the more I got to like them. They are still way out of my price bracket, but I very much like where they are headed. Recently, we saw them introduce the Rotondo UltraFino, a move away from their signature tonneau case into something rounder and more restrained. Now, that model gets a very nice rose gold treatment.

The case is made out of 18-carat rose gold, 39.5mm wide and just 8.9mm thick, slim for an automatic tourbillon. Finishing alternates satin brushing with mirror-polished bevels, and there's a black rubber gasket seated under the bezel that runs on every Bianchet as a house signature. The crown is black lacquered. Water resistance is 100 meters.

There's no dial in the conventional sense. The movement is fully skeletonized and openworked, so you're looking straight into the architecture, with the golden geometry of the bridges doing the work a dial normally would. The flying tourbillon sits exposed, and the black PVD bridges, set against the rose gold rotor, give it the monochrome-plus-gold look Bianchet is going for.

Inside is the in-house calibre UR01, an automatic flying tourbillon built in Grade 5 titanium and measuring 3.85mm thick. It runs at 3 Hz, holds 60 hours of power reserve, and has a solid 18-carat rose gold rotor along with a claimed 5,000 G shock resistance. The watch has a quick-release system: one configuration pairs a full rose gold bracelet with a black rubber strap, the other is a black-and-white rubber strap set.

The Bianchet Rotondo UltraFino Rose Gold comes in two variants, CHF 85,500 for the rubber-strap version and CHF 119,500 for the rose gold bracelet, both without taxes. See more on Bianchet's website.

5/

The Moser Endeavour Minute Repeater Cylindrical Tourbillon Skeleton Cosmic Rain Has Quite A Name

Quick, think of H. Moser & Cie. What’s the first thing that comes to mind? It’s the incredible dials, right? Yeah, me too. The dials are so nice, it’s easy to forget that Moser is really good at serious at complications and the incredibly named Endeavour Minute Repeater Cylindrical Tourbillon Skeleton Cosmic Rain reminds us of that.

The case is made out of titanium, 40mm wide and 14.4mm thick, with a sapphire crystal front and a display back. The crown is decorated with Moser's "M". On the side is a sliding bolt for the repeater slide that slides on a Teflon runner. Note how complex this watch is and it still manages to come packaged in a 40mm case. Even the thickness is not that extreme. Moser doesn’t give us a water rating, which is just a bit funny because I can’t exactly imagine this watch seeing any water, not even rain.

The face of the watch will take some breaths away. The main plate is fully skeletonised, so you look straight through to the calibre, with the repeater hammers and chimes sitting on the dial side rather than hidden out back. At 2 o'clock, a small domed aventurine sub-dial breaks the skeletonized look, finished in Moser's fumé gradient and inlaid by hand with thin curved strips of mother-of-pearl that scatter across it like stars. Leaf-shaped hour and minute hands point to the time.

Inside is the hand-wound calibre HMC 909, skeletonised completely, beating at 3Hz with 35 jewels and a 90-hour power reserve. The flying tourbillon sits at 6 o'clock under a skeletonised bridge and carries a cylindrical hairspring, hand-shaped by sister company Precision Engineering AG using a process that takes far longer than a flat spring. It comes on a grey nubuck alligator strap with a titanium pin buckle.

The new H. Moser & Cie. Endeavour Minute Repeater Cylindrical Tourbillon Skeleton Cosmic Rain reference 1909-0501 is limited to 20, priced at CHF 378,350. See more on the Moser website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• For Men’s Health, Brian Underwood investigates the flood of sunscreen misinformation on Instagram and TikTok, where influencers push inaccurate data about chemical UV filters, play chemist and promote their own DIY formulas, or even encourage no sun protection at all. Underwood sorts fact from fear, talking with dermatologists, chemists, and professionals who are working to reshape the messaging around sun exposure and sunscreen.

• Middle- and high-school kids of today are shattering track records on a weekly basis. Some of that is sneaker technology, some of it is training, some of it seems to be an intense competitive drive fueled by social media. Whatever it is, Brendan I. Koerner has seen it in his own kids—and now he throws himself into the world of scholastic speedsters for his latest Wired feature.

• He dresses up for his labor of love, always wearing a white shirt, a silk tie, and a blue four-pocket French work coat as he documents Nashville, Tennessee, moment-by-moment behind the lens of his Leica. Ray Di Pietro started photographing people and events in the city nine years ago and uses precise composition and framing to tell the story of the city and its people.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

My entire Instagram feed is just The Odyssey right now, and it’s kind of sad to see how many people are so deeply wrong about the Homer works. I’m not sure if this is an education thing, the fact that ti seems that many of these people have just learned about Homer a couple of months ago and got their info from AI abstracts of wikipedia pages, or just an asinine political agenda. What I do know is that I am forever grateful to my dad who read stories of Greek heroes to me in English when I was a kid. Not only did I learn English parallel to Croatian, it gave me an incredible basis for a broad and deep education. So, if you have kids, teach them the myths. In the meantime, listen to Stephen Fry on the Trojan War, because he obviously knows what he’s talking about.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Running around town today, so not funny quips from me.

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In this issue

• The Best Summer Diver Might Just Be This $450 Citizen You Never Have to Wind

• NOMOS Gives Us Another Small Take On The Already Compact Tetra

• G-Shock Goes Full On Space Age Again With The C2H4 GA-2100

• Legendary American Watchmaker RGM Renders A Snoopy On Their Otherwise Serious 151

• Romain Gauthier Shrinks The C To A More Comfortable 39.5mm

👂What’s new

1/

The Best Summer Diver Might Just Be This $450 Citizen You Never Have to Wind

Summer is the season for getting near, in, or under the water, and it has me thinking about what actually belongs on a wrist for a quick dive. I love a proper diver as much as anyone, but the best dive watches, at least they’ve been the best for me, are usually the no-fuss, affordable ones that require the least amount of carry effort. And Citizen is kind of always the best answer in this category. Four new Eco-Drive divers just launched in Japan; three of them are coming to the US.

The case is a very reasonable 40.6mm wide and 11.5mm thick in stainless steel, with brushed surfaces and polished chamfers to break up the light. On top is a unidirectional bezel in either black or blue (or orange, but more on that later), with a fully graduates 60 minute scale.Water resistance is 200 meters, which is all you need for the vast majority of water sports.

I’ve been trying to figure out the details of geographic releases for these watches, but it’s kind of difficult to do with Citizen. What I know for sure is that there is a Japanese exclusive variant that comes with a black dial and a very bright orange bezel. In terms of the rest of the world, I’m 100% sure that the other three are coming to the U.S. and just slightly less sure that these will make their way to Europe. Those three are a blue gradient dial with a dark blue bezel, a black dial with a black bezel and my favorite — a white dial with black bezel and a sharp orange seconds hand.

Inside is the Eco-Drive Caliber E118, rated to plus or minus 15 seconds per month with roughly 12 months of power on a full charge. All three come on BENEBiOL straps, a plant-derived biomass urethane.

The Citizen Promaster Dive is either on sale now or will be very soon, priced at $450. See more on the Citizen website.

2/

NOMOS Gives Us Another Small Take On The Already Compact Tetra

Despite sometimes having issues with longer lugs, Nomos was making small watches long before the rest of the industry decided compact was cool again. The Tangente has been 35mm since 1992, and plenty of the catalog sits under 38mm. The Tetra is a bit of a different beast, though, because a square case at a given width covers noticeably more real estate than a round one at the same number. That's why most Tetra models hover around 30mm. Today the brand adds two versions of its smallest square watch, the Tetra 27 white and the two-handed Tetra 27 duo.

The case measures 27.5mm by 27.5mm and just 6.1mm thick, framed by a narrow polished steel bezel with the double-stepped lugs that give the Tetra its Art Deco feel. A sapphire crystal sits up front, and you can choose a solid steel back or a sapphire display back. Take the sapphire. Water resistance is 50 meters.

The Tetra 27 white gets the most classic dial NOMOS makes: silver-plated galvanised, small seconds, Arabic numerals and markers borrowed from the Tangente, with blued steel hands. One change worth noting is the small seconds, now a flat round sub-dial rather than the recessed square one on the older 29.5mm hand-wound Tetra. The duo drops to hours and minutes only, with a two-tone galvanised dial: a light grey square at the centre and a matching grey field around the minute track.

Both models share the hand-wound calibre DUW 4001, an evolution of the old Alpha, which was itself NOMOS's in-house reworking of the Peseux 7001. It has moved well past its origins now, with a ¾ plate, Glashütte ribbing, perlage, a double-sunburst ratchet wheel, blued screws, an in-house escapement with a blue balance spring, and 53 hours of power reserve. Both come on a black Horween shell cordovan strap.

Both the Nomos Tetra 27 white and Tetra 27 duo are part of the permanent collection. Pricing starts from €1,660 for the Tetra 27 duo with the steel caseback, up to €2,120 for the Tetra 27 white with the sapphire back. See more on the Nomos website.

3/

G-Shock Goes Full On Space Age Again With The C2H4 GA-2100

I’m a big fan of G-Shock's 2100 line, but I have a bit of a problem with them. There are so many variants out there, I can’t decide which one to get. Well, this new release, a collaboration with C2H4, the LA fashion label with a taste for science-fiction and experimental design, might have fixed that problem. This collab takes inspiration from the Theme Building at LAX, that 1960s googie landmark that looks like a concrete spider from a Jetsons episode. And since I’m a sucker for Space Age stuff, this is something I just might get.

The case is the familiar 2100 platform, done in translucent gray resin, bezel and all, so you get the cloudy see-through look front to back. Shock resistant, as every G-Shock is, and water resistant to 200 meters.

The dial has brushed metallic silver plating done with vapor deposition, and the metallic treatment carries on to the hands. The reverse LCD digital display sits on what looks like a blue backdrop rather than the usual black. The Theme Building itself is etched into the caseback.

This is a standard analog-digital G-Shock module, and it comes on a matching translucent gray resin strap. I hardly ever mention packaging here, but this one is extremely cool: a bean-shaped retro-futuristic case that lifts its silhouette straight from the Panasonic TR-005 "Orbitel" television, one of the great space-age industrial objects of the 1960s.

The G-Shock x C2H4 GA-2100C2H426-8A is available now, priced at $245. See more on C2H4's website.

4/

Legendary American Watchmaker RGM Renders A Snoopy On Their Otherwise Serious 151

Snoopy shows up on a lot of watches, and while each appearance has it’s own story and the main reason why we have so many Snoopy watches is the fact that the Peanuts estate is masterful at merchandising, at least some of the Snoopy watch story can be attributed to Omega and their connection to NASA which embraced snoopy as their icon. The success of the Omega Snoopy release turned the beagle into shorthand for a certain kind of playful, collectible watch. Which just means that it’s great to see them on an RGM, a Pennsylvania brand that has spent more than 30 years on engine turning, in-house calibres, and enamel work with no interest in pop culture whatsoever. Founded by Roland G. Murphy in 1992 and building around 400 watches a year, RGM is the last name you'd expect to do a licensed cartoon dial. The new Model 151 Snoopy Flying Ace comes in two versions: a grand feu enamel edition and a more affordable painted one.

The watch uses RGM's Model 151 platform, a pilot-style design with a thin bezel and a lot of open dial. The case is 38.5mm wide in either stainless steel or CP2 titanium, and thickness depends on the dial: 9.9mm for the painted version, 10.6mm for the enamel. It's made in the US near RGM's Mount Joy workshop and hand-finished in-house. Water resistance is 50 meters.

The enamel dial is obviously the main attraction. It's a two-level white grand feu enamel, built up in layers and fired at high temperature, and RGM believes it's the first time Snoopy's Flying Ace has been done on a true grand feu dial. The scene shows Snoopy in his flying goggles on top of the red doghouse with a few clouds behind him. The painted version swaps in a matte light-blue metal dial with the same artwork. It gives up the depth and complexity of enamel but keeps the character.

Both versions use the Sellita SW300-1, the automatic ETA 2892-A2 alternative, beating at 4Hz, with roughly 52 hours of power reserve. RGM dresses it up with rhodium plating, Côtes de Genève, and perlage. It's fitted to a Hirsch Performance strap that combines leather with a rubber lining.

Prices start from $3,950 for the steel painted-dial model to $9,950 for the titanium grand feu enamel version. See more on the RGM website.

5/

Romain Gauthier Shrinks The C To A More Comfortable 39.5mm

Romain Gauthier is best known for movements finished to a level almost nobody can match by hand, but these often come at an extreme cost. That’s why the brand has the C, a slightly more accessible entry point to Romain Gauthier, rendered so far in titanium, platinum and Carbonium. Despite the variety of materials, all of them came in a 41mm wide case. Now, RG is shrinking down the C to a more manageable size.

The new case measures 39.5mm wide with a lug-to-lug of 46mm, and the thickness drops slightly from 9.55mm to 9.45mm. It’s still made out of natural grade 5 titanium, with that distinctive bezel machined from a round base and then given six straight cuts for the facets, the top surface and case flanks separated by contrasting brushed finishes. The crown sits at 2 o'clock, which is pure Romain Gauthier. Water resistance is 30 meters, down from the already modest 50 meters on the bigger editions, which is a shame on a watch that’s supposed to be casual and versatile.

The dial gets a metallised sapphire base with fine horizontal lines, keeping the asymmetrical layout of the bigger models: off-centre hour and minute hands, tapered markers of varying length, and a small seconds at 7 o'clock with its own tapering lines. Three colors are available on the highlights: pink, light blue and orange. The titanium hands have a lot of dimensions and are covered in Super-LumiNova glowing the same colour as the seconds subdial lines, matching the numerals and indexes.

The hand-wound in-house calibre carries over from the larger C, and it's a banger. Five finger bridges in a horizontal layout, all in grade 5 titanium, each with a double bevel, straight-grained surfaces and a hand-engraved dimpled texture are just some of the incredible things you’ll see here. The mainplate is hand-frosted, the gears and ratchet wheel circular-grained with bevelled spokes, the signature S-slot screws polished. It beats at 4Hz, with a 60-hour power reserve and uses a snail cam for the stop-seconds. The watches come on rubber straps.

The new Romain Gauthier C in 39.5mm is part of the permanent collection, priced at CHF 34,000, without tax. See more on the Romain Gauthier website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• Dinosaur skeletons are “coveted by the ultrarich,” Devon Pendleton writes, “not unlike sports franchises or Fabergé eggs.” And none are more coveted than those of the Tyrannosaurus rex; “It’s the best trophy kind of thing you could own,” boasts one proud owner. In recent years, a few T. rex specimens—named Shen, Titus, Peter, and, in two cases, Barbara—have come under scrutiny for their resemblance to others, or have otherwise had their integrity questioned. Pendleton examines a complicated market, a few contested specimens, and the man whose name keeps surfacing in relation to them.

• After the death of Adam Yauch—aka MCA and one-third of the Beastie Boys—the remaining members, Mike D and Ad-Rock, walked away from creating music. Fourteen years later, Mike D, or Michael Diamond, is back with a solo album, “Thank You,” to be released next month. Ben Sisario talks with the 60-year-old musician, who refers to the forthcoming project as “musically immature, but lyrically more mature.” Introspective and therapeutic, the album reflects Diamond’s life stage as a Gen X rapper and as a parent; his grown sons, Davis and Skyler, are credited for helping Diamond make his return to music.

• Kiana Mickles traces how the word “rave” has drifted from its underground and countercultural roots into something now attached to sanitized sponsored parties and coffee-shop pop-ups. Here, Mickles focuses specifically on Daybreaker, an organization that has thrown sober, wellness-centered sunrise dance parties for more than a decade.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

Ronnie, Ron, UltraRomance... whatever you call him, he is hard to miss. Vintage bicycles, a bushy beard, short shorts, and thick wool sweaters. His romantic and self-governed way of life feels reminiscent of another era.

July 22-24: Build, Launch, & Own Your First App With Ai

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Thanks for reading,
Vuk

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. That Doxa Great White collaboration is absolutely incredible.

AI Is Moving Fast. Here's How to Keep Up.

AI is moving faster than any other technology. New models. New tools. New claims. New noise.

Most people feel like they're behind. But the people that don't, aren't smarter. They're just better informed.

The Future Today is a daily briefing for people who want clarity. In one concise email each day, you'll get the most important AI and tech developments, learn why they matter, and what they signal about what's coming next.

Written for operators, builders, leaders, and anyone who wants to sound sharp when AI comes up in the meeting.

One email. Five Minutes. Stay ahead of 99% of the world.

Join Free Today →

In this issue

• Breitling Honors The Aston Martin DB5 With A Top Time B01 In Steel, Platinum, And Gold

• Doxa And Topper Jewelers Come Together On Another Great White Collaboration, Now A Chronograph

• Yema’s Official French Air Force Watch Gets A Slightly Unexpected Quartz Movement

• Gerald Charles’ New Trio Of Masterlink Watches Get Gem Set Bezels And Stone Dials

• HYT Dresses Its Most Technical Watch in Rose Gold and Black DLC, With Blue Fluid Time Telling

👂What’s new

1/

Breitling Honors The Aston Martin DB5 With A Top Time B01 In Steel, Platinum, And Gold

Way back in the gaudy 2000s and 2010s, Breitling had the most perfect partnership imaginable. They were very closely tied with Bentley. It was exactly what both brands needed because the Venn diagram of their respective audiences was a circle. I was a kid when those watches were coming out and I still remember how insanely flashy they were. This year, however, they teamed up with another British brand, but this time one known a bit more for its refinement — Aston Martin. This was all part of Breitling stepping up to sponsor the Aston Martin Aramco Formula One Team. Surpirsingly, we didn’t get to see a lot of watches come from the partnership. The one we did was incredibly cool, though — a Navitimer done in titanium. I hope that the lack of watches is not due to the abysmal season has been having. Well, the two brands are releasing new watches now, but less so F1 inspired, and more as an homage to one of the most beautiful cars of all time — the DB5, with three Top Time B01 chronographs. There’s a connection here that’s potentially even more interesting than the watches themselves. James Bond drove an Aston DB5 in Thunderball, in which he wore a modified Top Time, one of my favorite Bond watches, that had a Geiger counter.

The trio of DB5 Top Times all share the same case, cushion shape, measuring 41mm wide, 13.8mm thick, with a 47.9mm lug-to-lug. It really is a beautiful case that mixes historical era inspirations. For example, the pump pushers are pure 1960s, but then the slight corners of the case have grooves cut into them that are pure Art Deco. There are three case versions available: an all-steel one, a steel with platinum bezel and a full 18k red gold case. Sapphire crystals sit front and back, the crown screws down and 100 meters of water resistance.

The dials all have the same geometry, with chronograph counters at 6 and 9 o'clock, no date window breaking the symmetry, and the sub-dials take a squircle shape that echoes the case. The steel model gets a silver sunray dial with black concentric-grooved counters, the platinum-bezel version goes black with more shine, and the gold edition uses a black onyx dial. The hands and indexes are baton shaped and there’s a wooden rehaut around the perimeter of the dial, a reference to the DB5's steering wheel.

All three watches have the same COSC-certified B01 automatic, Breitling's in-house column-wheel chronograph beating at 4 Hz with a 70-hour power reserve. The sapphire caseback shows a specially engraved rotor: rhodium-plated on the silver-dial steel model, and 18K red gold with Aston Martin's winged logo on the platinum-bezel and gold versions. Each comes on a gradient calfskin strap with beige lining that nods to classic car upholstery, with steel folding clasps on the two steel models and a gold buckle on the red gold version.

Them new Breitling Top Time B01 Chronograph 41 Tribute to Aston Martin DB5 is available now, at a variety of prices and limited availability. The all-steel model is limited to 1,022 pieces at €10,500; the platinum-bezel version to 315 pieces at €16,500; and the gold version will be made in just 250 pieces, priced at €40,500. See more on the Breitling website.

2/

Doxa And Topper Jewelers Come Together On Another Great White Collaboration, Now A Chronograph

Doxa and Topper Jewelers have been running with their Great White collaboration for a few years now, and this is reportedly the last one. To close it out they've taken the recently revived SUB 200 T.Graph II. The Great White name comes from the fact that the colors of the dial have been inspired by Great White Shark, often found along Northern California’s Pacific coastline where Topper is located. And to make things even more interesting, the dial is fully lumed.

The case is the 42mm stainless steel elliptical cushion shape used across the T.Graph II line, 14.6mm thick with a lug-to-lug of 44mm. The patented unidirectional decompression bezel has Doxa's iconic sawtooth edge for grip, and the pump pushers are partially shrouded by the case, which keeps the vintage look. Water resistance is 200 meters.

The dial has a milky white luminous surface, blue details, and orange accents on the segmented 30-minute counter at 3 o'clock, with the running seconds at 9 o'clock and an orange tip on the central chronograph hand. There's no date, and almost every white element is coated in blue-emission Super-LumiNova, so in the dark the whole dial glows.

Inside is the Sellita SW 510, an automatic chronograph running at 4Hz with a 50-hour power reserve. The caseback swaps the Farallon Islands engraving of earlier editions for an engraved great white shark. The watch ships on Doxa's beads-of-rice steel bracelet with a folding clasp and dive extension, and an additional blue FKM rubber strap with steel end links comes in the box.

The new Doxa x Topper SUB 200 T.Graph II 'Great White' is limited to 100 pieces, priced at $4,690, available exclusively through Topper Jewelers, with part of the proceeds going to the Greater Farallones Association for marine conservation. See more on the Topper website.

3/

Yema’s Official French Air Force Watch Gets A Slightly Unexpected Quartz Movement

Yema, naturally, has a long and storied connection with the French armed forces, having made official watches for pretty much every single branch of their military. And the best thing about it is the fact that they make a huge number of these models to the public. The same applies to this latest edition, a watch made for the Armée de l'Air et de l'Espace, or the French Air and Space Force. It’s a fine looking military style watch, but it’s even more interesting when you see what’s inside.

The case is 38mm wide and a slim 9mm thick, excluding the double-domed sapphire crystal. Yema sandblasted the stainless steel with three different densities to create a camo shading effect across the case, which appears to be a bit more subtle than when we saw them use it on the Wristmaster, only making it even cooler. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The slate-gray dial has a coarse texture that kills glare and puts the smooth raised hour track into contrast. Hour markers are raised numerals, with a horizontal line from 9 to 3 to orient the dial at a glance, ringed by a printed railroad minute track on a sunken smooth band and a grainy outer ring carrying the 60-minute scale. The Yema logo sits below 12, the tricolour Air Force insignia above 6. The dark hour and minute hands have white lume inlays; the seconds hand gets a lollipop counterbalance and a red tip.

Inside is the Seiko caliber VH31, a not that often used quartz movement with a "quad-pulse" system that beats the seconds hand at the equivalent of 2Hz. Look closely and it moves with the slight sluggishness of an automatic running down, still far smoother than standard quartz. Seiko rates accuracy to 15 seconds a month with a two-year battery lifetime. It ships on a black woven nylon two-piece strap printed with the Air Force target emblem and closed by a signed steel pin buckle.

The Yema Flygraf Pilot French Air Force is available now for €459, which seems like quite the deal. See more on the Yema website.

4/

Gerald Charles’ New Trio Of Masterlink Watches Get Gem Set Bezels And Stone Dials

Gerald Charles keeps finding new ways to iterate on the Masterlink, and this one is about as intricate as they can get. These new versions of the Masterlink come with stone dials — aventurine, spectrolite or iron eye — paired with gem set bezels. It’s certainly a choice.

The case measures 38mm by 38mm and 7.9mm thick, made out of stainless steel. The white gold bezel holds 60 baguette-cut stones: blue sapphires, red sapphires or green tsavorites, each cut to follow the bezel's uneven edge so the surface. Each stone group is matched to a dial color. This is still a sporty watch, so the crown screws down and you get 100 meters of water resistance.

On the dial side, aventurine gives you that dense field of glittering inclusions, spectrolite is a Finnish labradorite that moves between blue, green and gold as the light moves, and iron eye is banded tiger's eye, jasper and hematite for an earthier look. Hour markers are matching gemstone, and the baton hands have Super-LumiNova inserts.

Inside is the calibre GCA5401, built for Gerald Charles by Vaucher Manufacture Fleurier and visible through the sapphire back. It has an off-centred micro-rotor, beats at 3Hz, and has 50 hours of power reserve. The integrated steel bracelet starts with curved links echoing the case "smile" before straightening out, with alternating brushed and polished surfaces, hidden screws and a concealed butterfly clasp.

Each configuration is limited to 10 pieces, priced at CHF 95,000 without taxes. See more on the Gerald Charles website.

5/

HYT Dresses Its Most Technical Watch in Rose Gold and Black DLC, With Blue Fluid Time Telling

A couple of months ago I saw my first HYT and it got me thinking: why hasn’t anyone else tried the whole time-telling-with-liquid-filled-baffles thing? I mean, the answer is quite obvious. It’s kind of a unique feature that’s so difficult to pull off, only HYT is crazy enough to do it. One could call it a gimmick, if that was the only thing that HYT did. Because they don’t, they do other technical things as well. Just know that those are even more insane than using liquid levels to tell the time. Stuff like the conical tourbillon, an absolute unit of a tourbillon that stands so far off the dial it makes the whole thing incredibly absurd. We’re now getting the Conical Tourbillon Midnight Blue, a new color and case for a watch that’s not easy to forget. Whether you like it or not.

The case pairs 5N rose gold with black DLC titanium, and it is enormous: 48mm wide, 52.30mm long, and 25.15mm thick. That last number is not a typo. I did not mean to type 15.15mm, which would already be quite thick. Nope, this watch is 25.15mm thick, but the vast majority of that is the extremely domed sapphire crystal that has to stand out so far to make room for the tourbillon. Gold is used on the frame, the crown and the side grilles, while the dark DLC coated titanium is seen through the cracks making up the supports. Water resistance is 30 meters, which is beside the point with this watch.

The dial is black-coated brass with a black grid, 3D appliques, and white Lumicast numerals. Blue tinted liquid rises and retrogrades through the borosilicate capillary around the perimeter to mark the hour, a blue central hand indicates the minutes, and three blue-filled spheres orbit the tourbillon at four, five, and six turns a minute. Because those speeds never sync, the animation never repeats the same way twice inside an hour. It looks fantastic.

Inside is the hand-wound calibre 701-TC, made out of 533 components, beating at 3 Hz with a 40-hour power reserve. Those seem like fairly regular stats, but consider the fact that you can’t wind it with the crown, but instead you need a special tool to do so. Then, there’s the conical tourbillon that sits at the center with its balance inclined 30 degrees off horizontal, a geometry HYT traces back to Walter Prendel's inclined tourbillon and Eric Coudray's work reviving it. It’s an incredible thing to behold. The watch comes on a black rubber strap with a black DLC titanium pin buckle.

The HYT Conical Tourbillon Midnight Blue (ref. H03000-A) is a limited edition of eight, priced at CHF 355,000, excluding taxes. See more on the HYT website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• Diana Davidson’s acting career peaked in 1971, when her character was shot and killed in the opening scene of Dirty Harry — a scene Annakeara Stinson, her daughter, knew from a young age. Stinson explores the off-screen violence that pushed her mother out of the spotlight. Her essay reveals a woman more complicated than family stories allowed for.

• Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, thousands of foreign volunteers have traveled to the country to fight alongside Ukrainian armed forces. Erik Giggleman—”Giggles,” a decorated US Army staff sergeant who survived two tours in Afghanistan—was one of them. Laura Beil’s moving profile of Giggleman is a miniature family epic, rooted in early exposure to the senselessness of loss.

• Virginia Giuffre made global headlines for her fight against her sexual abusers among the wealthy elite, all detailed in a bestselling memoir. Now new questions have emerged about the private anguish the most famous accuser of Jeffrey Epstein faced at home. Her husband, whom she once credited with helping her escape Epstein, had assaulted and tormented her for years.

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One video you have to watch today

I’ve been enough of a Marvel fan to get a job at the company at one time. And I think there are some seriously good movies in the first three phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But the output has deteriorated so severely since, I completely lost interest. I was sure that Avengers Doomsday would fix all that, with the return of the things we loved from the early MCU days. But if this trailer is anything to go by, we’re in for a couple of very rough years from Marvel again.

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Vuk

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. You might have noticed that there was no newsletter on Friday. Like I said, this weekend my wife Ana turned 40 and we threw her a party on Friday. Not only was it the most epic party of all time (no joke, a generational party), it wrecked me for two whole days so my plan to email you on Saturday did not pan out. Anyways, making up for lost time now.

Every headline satisfies an opinion. Except ours.

Remember when the news was about what happened, not how to feel about it? 1440's Daily Digest is bringing that back. Every morning, they sift through 100+ sources to deliver a concise, unbiased briefing — no pundits, no paywalls, no politics. Just the facts, all in five minutes. For free.

Read the newsletter trusted by 4.5 million fact-seekers.

In this issue

• The MoonSwatch Mission To The Moon 1969 Charges 1969 Gold Prices For Real Moonshine Gold

• Bell & Ross Sends The BR-03 GMT Into The Northern Lights With A Green Lume

• Unimatic Brings Clay Court Season to Four References Versions Of The Modello Uno And Modello Due

• The Very Cool Armin Strom Mirrored Force Resonance Gets A Red Dial

• Krayon's Anywhere Parhelion Wraps A Sunrise Complication In A Sapphire Gradient

👂What’s new

1/

The MoonSwatch Mission To The Moon 1969 Charges 1969 Gold Prices For Real Moonshine Gold

The MoonSwatch has reached the point where almost every new variation gets a collective sigh as much as a cheer, and the jokes about Swatch never letting the concept rest have started to write itself. This one, however, is something else. I’m deeply in love with it and I hate that I can’t help myself. The new Swatch Mission To The Moon 1969 MoonSwatch is chock full of references. First, it launched a few days ago, July 16 at 15:32 CEST, the exact minute the Saturn V lifted off in 1969. BUt even better than that, Swatch melted down gold from Omega spare parts in its own foundry, turned it into 18K Moonshine Gold, put 11 grams of it into the watch, and is now charging you what 11 grams of gold cost in 1969. That was CHF 48. That’s cool.

The case is the familiar Bioceramic MoonSwatch shell, same dimensions as every other one, now done in black, with a gold-printed tachymeter on the bezel under an antireflective coating. The crown and pushers are solid 18K Moonshine Gold. Each case is individually numbered x/1969 on the left flank, the same way Omega numbered the 1994 Apollo 11 editions. The battery cover on the back carries a gold Moon complete with a boot print, plus the landing date and "Mission To The Moon" in gold.

The dial is made out of Moonshine Gold, Omega's proprietary alloy, paler than standard yellow gold and vertically brushed. It also uses the same handset as the 2019 Apollo 11: black-filled gold hours and minutes with a black central chronograph hand, black sub-dial hands. There's also an Au750 hallmark engraved on the dial.

The movement is the standard MoonSwatch quartz, unchanged, no earthrise or moonphase here. The strap is black rubber with gold Swatch, Omega, and MoonSwatch logos printed on it and a gold lining, which seems to have a moon-like texture.

This just might be the coolest MoonSwatch to date, which, of course, means you won’t be able to get one. Swatch will require you to fill out an ESTA form on their website between July 16th at 15:32 CEST and July 21st at 23:59 CEST, and Swatch then picks 1,969 applicants who then get instructions to collect the watch from a boutique. As you might have guessed, the watch is limited to 1,969 pieces, and priced at CHF 500. See more on the Swatch website.

2/

Bell & Ross Sends The BR-03 GMT Into The Northern Lights With A Green Lume

When they’re not focusing on recreating airplane instruments on your wrist or playing around with kind of kitschy aviation references, Bell & Ross is really good at using lume. That’s why they have the Lum series, which is a very nice playground for them. The latest addition is the BR-03 GMT Green Lum, a limited run of the 2021-generation GMT with a gradient dial meant to look like aurora borealis through a cockpit window. I’m digging it.

The case is the familiar rounded square, 42mm wide and 11.3mm thick, water-resistant to 100 meters with a sapphire crystal on top. The four exposed screws at the corners are still there. Finishing includes brushed surfaces, wide polished bevels along the edges. The bidirectional 24-hour bezel gets a new black polished ceramic insert with all markings in green-glwing C3.

The dial has a vertical gradient from green at the bottom to black at the at. Numerals, markers and hands are all coated in pale green C3. The handset is blackened here instead of polished steel, suiting the nighttime flying theme. The seconds hand still has a little aeroplane counterweight, and the GMT hand is an openworked triangle.

Inside is the BR-CAL.303, a Sellita SW330-2 which beats at 4Hz, with a 54-hour power reserve. It's a caller-style GMT, so you independently adjust the central 24-hour hand. Fine for tracking a second zone from your desk, less useful if you actually fly for a living. It comes on a black rubber strap with a black synthetic fabric strap in the box.

The Bell & Ross BR-03 GMT Green Lum is limited to 500, priced at €4,900. See more on the Bell & Ross website.

3/

Unimatic Brings Clay Court Season to Four References Versions Of The Modello Uno And Modello Due

UNIMATIC has built its whole identity on restraint, and they show the same amount of it when they do collaborations. Which is a good thing, of course. And it’s very evident in this new tennis-themed capsule collection, which subtly hints at the sports it’s paying homage to. The Tennis Collection applies to four references across the Modello Uno diver and Modello Due field platforms, all sharing a clay-court red dial with matte white detailing.

The Modello Uno references use the familiar sandblasted 316L steel case at 41.5mm wide including the bezel, 13.2mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 49mm, a 120-click mono-directional bezel with matte black aluminum insert, and the screw-down crown which has the Alchemical Sun engraving. The Modello Due drops to 38mm with a lug-to-lug of 47.5mm, a thickness of 12.7mm and the fixed monoblock bezel. Both get sapphire crystals with inner AR coating and 300 meters of water resistance, and both have a tennis ball motif on the screw-down caseback.

The dial is the most obvious connection with the sport. You get a clay red base, matte white open seconds rails and trims, and Super-LumiNova C1 throughout. The seconds hand gets a dark yellow luminous tip, which is an obvious reference to a tennis ball.

The GMT references have the Seiko NH34 A with hacking seconds and a 24-hour hand; the standard references use the NH35 A. Power reserve is over 41 hours on all four. Straps are black two-piece nylon with a safety-yellow three-layer keeper and sandblasted UNIMATIC-signed hardware.

Each reference is limited to 99 individually numbered examples. Pricing is as such: $745 for the U1-TSP, $860 for the U1-GMT-TSP, $630 for the U2-TSP, and $790 for the U2-GMT-TSP. See more on the Unimatic Website.

4/

The Very Cool Armin Strom Mirrored Force Resonance Gets A Red Dial

The Armin Strom Mirrored Force Resonance hasn’t changed all that much since the brand redesigned it in 2022, so you always get the two balance wheels, two escapements, one movement, linked so they fall into sync with each other. But why would you change something that’s so good. What you want to do with it is iterate. That’s why we’ve already seen the watch in green, ice blue, rose gold, ruby, and a Zeitgeist anniversary edition. Now, we’re getting a red version.

The watch comes in a stainless steel case that measures 43mm wide, 11.5mm thick, with a 49.60mm lug-to-lug. The case has polished tops of lugs, beautiful polished facets and a polished plain fixed bezel, while the sides of the watch have a vertically brushed finish. On top is a box-shaped sapphire crystal that extends all the way to the edges, while out back is a flat sapphire crystal. Water resistance is 30 meters.

The dial keeps the same setup with the offset dial for the hours and minutes and the resonance mechanism, two balance wheels oscillating in opposite directions, connected by Armin Strom’s patented resonance clutch spring on the left side of the dial. On the right side of the dial is a smaller time dial that’s now hand-guilloché cut on a rose-engine lathe and finished in a deep red. Black azuré chapter rings surround the twin seconds registers, and the off-centre hours and minutes sit under faceted applied markers that float above the guilloché.

Visible from front and back is the manually wound Caliber ARF21, which beats at 3.5Hz and has a 48 hour power reserve. It has two independent oscillators, each equipped with its own balance wheel and hairspring, synchronized via the brand’s patented clutch spring. To show this off, the movement has twin seconds counters, which can be reset with the pusher at 2. You will then get to witness them synchronize once again. The watch comes on a grey Alcantara strap with red and white stitching.

The new Armin Strom Mirrored Force Resonance Ruby is limited to fifteen pieces and priced at CHF 76,000. See more on the Armin Strom website.

5/

Krayon's Anywhere Parhelion Wraps A Sunrise Complication In A Sapphire Gradient

A couple of years ago, Krayon founder Rémi Maillat went to Greenland with photographer Fei Hou and saw a parhelion, the optical effect where sunlight refracting through ice crystals in cold high clouds throws bright false suns alongside the real one. And when you’re a founder of a brand like Krayon, an experience like that can be funneled to a number of different results. This experience, the one of seing the parhelion, results in the Krayon Anywhere Parhelion, a CHF 430,000 sapphire studded watch based on an absolute legend.

The case remains pretty much unchanged in dimensions at 42mm wide and 9.5mm thick, now in white 18k gold. Overall this is pretty restrained watch. At least the original Anywhere is, despite the slightly large dimensions. This variant, however, is not restrained.

Sapphire front and back, 30 meters of water resistance. Restrained proportions, then 124 baguette-cut sapphires running across the bezel, case middle, lugs and crown side, plus 35 more on the buckle. The stones grade from white through pale blue into midnight blue, and Krayon says finding stones that would step cleanly through that gradient took close to a year. At 12 o'clock sits a single white sapphire cut into a Y shape echoing the brand logo, a new shape Krayon calls the Krayon Cut, standing in for the brightest point of the parhelion.

The dial centre is mother-of-pearl, picked because it never sits still in the light. Eleven diamond hour markers use the same Krayon Cut and are invisibly set so they read as floating. Around the outside are the sunrise and sunset indications, the rotating 24-hour scale, and the date at 6 o'clock, with MIDDAY, MIDNIGHT, SIX AM and SIX PM in Krayon's own typography. The mother-of-pearl and the diamonds work together better than a description suggests; the dial genuinely looks like water under ice.

Nothing changed underneath. The hand-wound manufacture calibre C030 carries over, 432 components, 55 jewels, 3Hz, 72-hour power reserve. Location setting is done by Krayon rather than the owner, so if you move, the watch goes back to Geneva for recalibration. It comes on a dark blue alligator strap with a white gold pin buckle carrying the same graduated sapphire setting as the case.

The Anywhere Parhelion is not limited and costs CHF 430,000. More at krayon.ch.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• For The Dial, Ariel Delgado Dixon recalls her time spent in what she calls The Service, an exclusive underground marijuana operation that ran in New York City. Dixon spent her time walking the Boss’s dog, a “barrel-chested mutt” called Scarface who had a penchant for pooping in the middle of traffic. Here, she recounts the Boss’s larger-than-life presence as a weed kingpin.

• In an excerpt from his book, Our Wild Familiars: How Animals Are Adapting to Cities and Reshaping the Natural World, Dan Werb makes the case that raccoons—brushed off by most people as pests—are intelligent and adaptable animals. Werb shows how raccoons thrive in cities like Toronto, learning and unlearning habits as they navigate different microenvironments. A delightful read, full of Werb’s eye for scene and character.

• There’s been plenty of coverage on the Weeki Wachee mermaids in recent years, and Jack Burke isn’t trying to break any new ground here. But he does manage to bring to life the weird underground theatre where the mermaids have danced for decades, beautifully evoking the wonder of celestial blue light and sparkly tails. Burke’s piece is a gentle homage to “this weird little relic from another age”—a time in America that belonged to the hustlers and the dreamers.

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One video you have to watch today

I did not like this car when it came out. I still think it’s pretty ugly. But listen to that thing.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Bit of a late one today, but for good reason. My wife is turning 40 this weekend and we’re throwing a massive party tomorrow with a lot of cooking to do. That’s why I’m going radio silence a bit until next week. But no worries, a newsletter is still coming tomorrow, there are some seriously good releases all over the place.

Every headline satisfies an opinion. Except ours.

Remember when the news was about what happened, not how to feel about it? 1440's Daily Digest is bringing that back. Every morning, they sift through 100+ sources to deliver a concise, unbiased briefing — no pundits, no paywalls, no politics. Just the facts, all in five minutes. For free.

Read the newsletter trusted by 4.5 million fact-seekers.

In this issue

• Yema Goes Submarine Hunting With a Forged Carbon Navygraf

• Laco Shrinks The Frankfurt GMT To 40mm But Keeps Everything That Makes It A Cool Watch

• Nodus And Raven Return With A Fourth TrailTrekker, This Time In Forged Carbon And Great Lume

• Benjamin James Follows Up The Fantastic Scarifour With The Deerhurst Regulator

• Panerai Has Two Different Approaches For Their Latest America’s Cup Watches

👂What’s new

1/

Yema Goes Submarine Hunting With a Forged Carbon Navygraf

Yema has spent the last couple of years bolting its CMM.20 micro-rotor calibre into every dive watch it can, and the results keep getting more interesting. The new Navygraf Barracuda CMM.20, all in forged carbon and red accents, is made with the French Marine Nationale as a tribute to the Barracuda-class nuclear attack submarines and the crews who run them.

The steel case measures 39mm wide, 9.75mm thick without the crystal, with a lug-to-lug of 46mm, which is a pretty wearable size. On top is a unidirectional 120-click bezel made out of forged carbon, with a countdown timer that has the first 20 minutes marked in bright red. This is a nod to the synchronisation procedures submarine crews use to coordinate timed operations. Out back is a caseback that has a fantastic red-tinted sapphire crystal, chosen because submarines run red lighting at night to preserve the crew's night vision, with the insignia of the French Navy's submarine forces. On the side is a screw down crown protected by angular lugs, which gives you 300 meters of water resistance.

The red from the bezel carries on to the dial, which is also made out of forged carbon. The red appears on the Barracuda signature, as well as the fantastic oversized arrow minutes hand. Applied indices and broad hands are filled with Super-LumiNova and, thankfully, there’s no date aperture.

Inside is the calibre CMM.20, designed, made and assembled in Morteau, France, developed with Olivier Mory, with components sourced in France and nearby Switzerland. It beats at 4 Hz with a tungsten micro-rotor, a 70-hour power reserve, and regulation to -3/+7 seconds per day. You have a choice of a black NATO or a steel bracelet with a micro-adjust clasp.

The new Yema Navygraf Barracuda CMM.20 is limited to 400 pieces, available now, priced at €2,249 on the strap and €2,499 on the bracelet. See more on the Yema website.

2/

Laco Shrinks The Frankfurt GMT To 40mm But Keeps Everything That Makes It A Cool Watch

The Laco Frankfurt GMT has been pretty much universally adored online, except for one problem. It’s pretty large at 43mm, excluding the possibility of a lot of wrists wearing one. Well, Laco just fixed that and this will be a very popular watch, now that it measures 40mm wide, keeping the same stealthy look that won them a Red Dot award for design.

The case is made out of stainless steel, finished in a dark sandblast, 40mm wide, 11.9mm thick, with a 47mm lug-to-lug and 20mm wide lugs. The matte surface is incredibly well done on a lot of these Laco watches. On top is a double-domed sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating on both sides, and the case back is solid with an engraved airplane relief. You get two crowns on the side, with really nice protectors on the case, with one operating the time and winding mechanisms, while the other rotates the internal 24-hour bezel. Both of these crowns screw down, which gets you 200 meters of water resistance.

Two dials are available: black or grey, both matte. Arabic numerals and indices are filled with Super-LumiNova C3, the hour hands are blued, and the GMT hand gets an orange Super-LumiNova tip. The seconds hand has a small stylized aircraft as a counterbalance, which is just fun. Date sits at six o'clock.

Inside is the Laco calibre 330, which is essentially a Sellita SW330-2. It beats at 4Hz, with a 56 hour power reseve. It ships on a water resistance black Fibertech strap, and the box includes a second two-piece nylon strap in orange and grey, a strap-changing tool, and a "Remove Before Flight" keychain, all in an aluminum case.

The new Laco Frankfurt 40 GMT is available now in black (ref. 862187) or grey (ref. 862188) for €1,850. See more on the Laco website.

3/

Nodus And Raven Return With A Fourth TrailTrekker, This Time In Forged Carbon And Great Lume

Two years ago, two U.S. based indie brands, Nodus from California and Raven from Kansas, teamed up to release one of the most sought-after watches of the year, the TrailTrekker. It was an extremely well build, great looking and fantastically priced GMT that sold out instantly. They followed that up with an icy version and now we’re getting a third variant. This is the new Nodus x Raven TrailTrekker Carbon and that name kind of gives it away — it’s the familiar TrailTreeker with carbon details. But not just carbon… there’s also a bunch of cool lume use here.

The case comes from the Nodus Contrail GMT: 39.5mm wide, 11.8mm thick, steel under a dark grey DLC coating that handles scratches and gives the whole watch into stealth mode. Water resistance is 200 meters. New on this model is the 24-hour bezel which now has a forged carbon insert. Forged carbon is chopped carbon fibre re-bonded with resin under heat and pressure, so each gets unique striations.

Nodus and Rave use the same forged carbon on the dial, and both carbon instances have resin infused with Super-LumiNova, which means the swirl pattern glows in the dark. That’s a super cool look. Hour markers are squares, triangles and tags borrowed from the Raven Trekker, while a date window sits at six. The red GMT hand is the only colour on the watch.

Inside is the Miyota calibre 9075, automatic, beating at 4 Hz, with a 42-hour power reserve. The caseback is solid and stamped with the TrailTrekker caravan. It comes on a steel flatlink bracelet with an FKM rubber strap in the box.

The Nodus x Raven TrailTrekker Carbon is priced at $1,075, and will be available first at the Intersect Los Angeles watch show on July 17th and 18th, with general sale opening July 22nd. See more on the Nodus website.

4/

Benjamin James Follows Up The Fantastic Scarifour With The Deerhurst Regulator

The quote "Luck is when preparation meets opportunity" is widely attributed to the Roman philosopher Seneca. And like is often the case with quotes like these, there’s almost zero evidence that Seneca actually said this, but that won’t stop us from using it. And it’s a perfect quote to use when talking about the watch brand Benjamin James. A couple of years ago, they released their first watch, the Scarifour. It is a very cool dressy, sporty, square and small watch that was well design and built. It garnered a fair share of popularity, including a lot from me as I’ve been a fan from the start. Then Patek Philippe released the Cubitus, which prompted the New York Times to feature the Scarifour which was very similar in look, only better, at a much lower price. From then, Benjamin James has been on a fantastic roll. Now, after two years of development, we’re getting the follow-up to the Scarifour. This is the Benjamin James Deerhurst, a pretty wild looking dress-adjacent, neo-vintage inspired manually-wound regulator in a curved rectangular case. It’s a lot, and it’s cool.

The case measures 36mm wide by 42mm long and a pretty fantastic 9.1mm thick, thanks to that manual-wind movement. It’s made out of stainless steel, with deep bevelling on the lugs and a three-row Clous de Paris bezel that gives the whole thing an angular edge against the softer curves of the case profile. It’s a choice that certainly isn’t for everyone, but I love it. You get sapphire crystals on both sides, and water resistance is 50 meters.

Three dial colors are available at launch: Old English White, Burgundy and Denim Blue. All deeply lacquered and polished, with colour-matched subdials recessed and finished in fine concentric rings for a bit of textural contrast against the flat main surface. Small polished dome markers indicate the minute track, matching the handset finish. This being a regulator setup, you get a central hand showing you the minutes, a small seconds at 6 o’clock and an hour display at 12 o’clock. They also use a pretty great custom font for the numerals.

Inside is the Sellita SW266-1 M. It’s manually wound, and since it’s a regulator setup based on the SW200 series of movements, it beats at 4Hz and has a 40ish hour power reserve. You can have the watches on either a metal bracelet or taupe brown or black leather.

Pre-orders for the new Benjamin James Deerhurst open today, 16 July at 5pm BST, with delivery in November. Prices start at £945 excluding taxes. See more on the Benjamin James website.

5/

Panerai Has Two Different Approaches For Their Latest America’s Cup Watches

The 38th America's Cup will take place in Naples, Italy, with the main Cup Match beginning on July 10, 2027, and the Preliminary Regatta starting in early September. And while there are a few watch brands that are heavily connected with the Cup, I always think of Panerai the moment I think of America’s Cup. That’s because the brand has been a sponsor of the Luna Rossa team since 2019, and has been releasing watches in partnership ever since. We’ve seen Carbotech, titanium, GMTs, chronographs, and a 47mm diver, among others. Now, some time before the start of the Cup, we’re getting two new watches with the same partnership, the Luminor Luna Rossa Chrono PAM01768 and the Luminor Luna Rossa GMT PAM01791.

The chronograph is the more practical of the pair, at least when it comes to sailing. Its case is 44mm wide, made out of steel, with the iconic cushion shape, crown-protecting bridge, and general heft that make a Luminor recognizable across a room. Water resistance is 100 meters The GMT goes the other way, much more wearable at 40mm, which puts it among the smallest watches Panerai has made for this collection, and it is the first Luna Rossa watch to get a metal bracelet. That changes the character quite a bit. It’s also water resistant to 100 meters.

Both dials are silver sun-brushed with red accents pulled from the Luna Rossa team colors. On the chronograph the red shows up on the central chronograph seconds hand, which works with the tachymeter scale printed on the flange to read average speed over a kilometre in either km/h or mph. On the GMT the red is used on the small seconds hand and the arrow-tipped GMT hand, whose shape is meant to echo the yacht's sail. The oversized luminous numerals and sandwich construction are standard Luminor, and they still look great.

The chronograph uses the calibre P.9210, which is an ETA base with a Dubois-Depraz chrono module, beating at 4 Hz, with a 42 hours of power reserve. The GMT uses the P.900/GMT, a ValFleurier-based automatic with a three-day power reserve and a 12-hour second time zone. While the GMT gets the bracelet, the chronograph gets an bi-material grey textile and rubber Velcro strap with a Luna Rossa red stripe, plus a black rubber strap in the box.

The PAM01768 is limited to 500 examples priced at €11,200 and ships in a blue cherry wood box. The PAM01791 joins the regular collection at €11,100. See more on the Panerai website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• When Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed by the U.S. government, they left behind two sons, ages 6 and 10. All these years later, Robby and Michael are still trying to make sense of what happened. They’ve contended with painful revelations—most notably that, despite the Rosenbergs’ repeated insistence to the contrary, their father was in fact a Soviet spy—and impossible questions. Why, for example, didn’t Ethel cooperate with the government and come home to her sons?

• Parenting isn’t easy, especially when your kids don’t respond to conventional tactics. But Meghan Flaherty has a trick up her gauntlet: a lifelong love of fantasy and role-playing games. To the dungeon—and a quest to unlock her eight-year-old’s sense of self!

• There’s a lot to dislike about the 2026 World Cup. The US’s xenophobic politics, for one: a Somali referee deported before the tournament even began; Iraq’s star player detained for seven hours at O’Hare; visas denied to Iranian staff and an Iraqi team photographer; and the entire Iranian team prohibited from training or even sleeping on American soil. Then there are the compulsory hydration breaks, which fans suspect exist mainly to generate more revenue. And yet, the matches have been thrilling, and the world keeps watching. In this short, sharp dispatch for The Paris Review, Jonathan Wilson—author of Kick and Run: Memoir with Soccer Ball and a fan who’s watched every World Cup since 1962—touches on both the highs and lows of this year’s tournament, from border-patrol nightmare stories to Cape Verde’s incredible run.

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One video you have to watch today

This has got to be the best concert booking of all time. Tiny Desk Concerts made their name with unplugged intimate performances from global superstars. To have a grindcore band go wild among the desks, in what has to be their most well lit performance ever, exposing how old the members of the band are, is just magical.

Messi's 800th-Goal Jersey. Win It. Free to Enter.

Kalshi is giving away a different signed jersey every day through July 7. Modrić, Falcao, Varane, Ferdinand, Villa, and others. Every daily entry stacks toward the grand prize: Messi's game-worn jersey. Check in daily in the Kalshi app and share to earn a bonus entry.

Enter Free Today

_{Free to enter. App required. No purchase necessary. 18+, U.S. only (excl. NY & FL).}

Thanks for reading,
Vuk