If, like many, you’ve always gazed longingly at the Fifty Fathoms only to discover they’re impossibly valuable, it might be worth a second look. Values have softened a bit. And this, the Rotomatic, is the most approachable vintage Fifty Fathoms made. The Rotomatic was the Fifty Fathoms made for the...

Exotic dials aren’t just for Rolex. Meet the Omega equivalent of Paul Newman, just no one ever frames it in that light. This is the 145.022 ‘Orange Racing’, a 1969/1970 Speedmaster variant with a grey Singer dial that is about as colorful as a Coldplay concert on acid. No one...

The 6241 is a fascinating point in the long, steady march of Daytona evolution. Screw down, millerighe pushers had just been introduced. But not all Rolex clients loved the idea. One year after the introduction of the first true Oyster case 6240, which was intended to be the direction of...

The 565 one of the earliest examples of a Patek Philippe that flirted with sporting ambition, a two-body Taubert & Fils (formerly F. Borgel) 35mm case with a screw back that was way, and I mean way, ahead of its time. It is the vintage Patek Philippe that got a...

The 1016 has this quality very few watches can pull off. First, it’s never out of place. But more importantly, it is equally at home in a dive bar in rural New Mexico or at the Atlas Bar in Singapore. To put it another way, it’s classless, capable, and collected....

Of all the pilot watches IWC make, and there are many, the 3705 might be the most special. First, there’s no Top Gun branding, that hadn’t been invented yet in 1993. Second, it was materially innovative. Hublot and AP might enjoy shouting about their new ceramic technology, but IWC were...

This is where the 222 and even Overseas began. This, not the 222, was the first Vacheron Constantin integrated bracelet steel sports watch. It’s called the Royal Chronometer, but better known by ref. 2215. Introduced in 1975, it was replaced by the 222 just (this gets a bit confusing now)...

Damn nearly everyone who’s into vintage watches at a certain level develops a soft spot for the Polerouter. It is the least discussed work of Genta, aesthetically all kinds of restrained, art deco perfect. It was technically competent, the world’s first micro-rotor wristwatch (Büren, I don’t want to hear it)....

There are Day-Dates and then there are Day-Dates that look like they smoke on airplanes. This is an 1806, which is precisely 3 better than the 1803 you’re used to. That 6 denotes a Florentine (sometimes called Morellis) bezel and case finish, which is a hand-hammered texturize finish. Florentine cases...

If I were to ask a reader at random, ‘What is a Royal Oak?’ Most would answer something like this, ‘A luxury, steel sports watch where the case is integrated to the bracelet with an octagonal bezel and monocoque case.’ This 14800BA is, well gold. And you’ll note, it’s on...

You wouldn’t guess it at a glance, but this is a perpetual calendar. It’s just a perpetual calendar in titanium with a spherical palladium/zirconium moonphase and day/month apertures in a place you might not expect. There’s an inherent paradox here. Denis Flageollet has had some pretty audacious cases and designs...

There is an intangible allure to true vintage Rolex which has lived with just a single owner. Is watch really any different if one person or two have owned it? That depends entirely on the people in question. The majority of us won’t have ever had the option to have...

This is an IWC you probably won’t have seen or heard of. It’s a ref. 5251, the picture of 1980s excess in two dimensions: 46mm wide but a remarkable 9.5mm thin. This thing makes the Padellone look like a tea saucer in both dimensions, but it’s not without reason. Kurt...

Richard Mille did not invent casual haute horlogerie, but the 90s did. The dot-com bubble millionaires were of a different ilk to pre-quartz-crisis wealth. So Patek Philippe approached the problem with typical-of-era obsessive over-engineering and thought. In the process, they accidentally made the watch world’s ultimate summer watch. The Aquanaut...

Perceptions of watches change over time and no watch may have rocketed from total obscurity to the spotlight as quickly as the 222 last year. The 222 was, for some time, the very unobvious, alternative choice. I know this because for a decade until 2022, when someone asked me ‘Royal...

The 1665 Double Red Sea-Dweller (DRSD) is like a 5513 Sub turned up to eleven. It’s a little more technical with a helium valve, a little more appealing to some for its lack of cyclops, and just a little more nuanced in the details. But this DRSD goes way past...

Until this year in the new 1908, the words Rolex and guilloché almost never went together. But very, very occasionally, there was a Day-Date with a hand engine turned dial. A quick Google will turn up the last one that came to market which we covered, a square pyrimidal cut....

The first of anything in Rolex-land tends to be a bit different, not just because it’s new, but relative to what came after. These small, initial periods of experimentation are where you get meters first Subs, red depth Datejusts, fuchsia GMTs, ‘Blackout’ 14270s, and, indeed, this Floating Cosmograph. This is...