Technically speaking, this is a blue dial. If you order an extract of archive from AP, it will tell you it’s a blue Stern-made petit tapisserie. Except it isn’t, is it? This is blue in the same way that David Bowie dressed reserved: maybe in the early years, but by...

We need to talk about early De Bethune. Pre WatchBox majority stake purchase, pre spaceship case designs, pre tenuous Starry Varius puns. The very early DB series, call it roughly DB1 through DBS or 2002-2005, are quite unlike anything else in watchmaking. There are hints of what was to come,...

My favorite food critic ever, AA Gill, always used to write that the quality of any restaurant’s culinary ability was always inversely proportional to the grandeur of its view. Anyone who’s ever lived in Malibu can attest to this. He was so correct that the analogy holds well outside of...

Post WWII, the Tri-Compax was it. Introduced at Baselworld 1944, the triple-complication (it’s often mistakenly assumed that “tri-compax” refers to the triple chronograph sub dial configuration) aviator’s offering was every bit as stylish as it was complicated. There aren’t many designs which feel perfect nearly a century on, this is...

It is sometimes said that contrast is nature’s way of drawing attention. I was reminded of this recently by a friend, who often enjoys pairing a Royal Oak with Crocs. So is this Tiffany 1016 more attention-grabbing? Not really. At a glance, not at all. That’s its charm. We’re all...

I don’t understand much of modern Omega. Maybe I’m a cynic. But one glance at their website shows Eddie Redmayne trying to look like a grown-up with an orange Aqua Terra that was clearly inspired by an Oyster Perpetual. The once storied De Ville line now seems like a miscellaneous...

For most Lange 1s, the chances you have to acquire one are plentiful, given you have the funds. Perhaps the earlier solid back executions less so. But even less common than those is what you see here. Not the 101.030, but a factory Wellendorff bracelet. Bracelets really make up such...

Rolex’s storied professional line conjures images of Pan-Am, Comex, Hillary, spelunking, the Daytona 500, and, if you like 5s on your dial, the British RAF (Air-King). Yet there is one professional’s Rolex which often receives little or no mention. Many Rolexes today a marketed under the heading ‘rare’. The 6541...

For reasons I don’t fully understand, the Big Block hasn’t hit big time. The values of vintage Tudor relative to vintage Rolex are a particularly interesting microcosm to study here. If you want a 7928 Tudor Sub, today they’re about as much as Rolex’s 5513. Original Rangers too, are often...

One of the things I most love about some of Journe’s work is that you get the feeling he was compulsively obsessed. There’s enjoying your work and then there’s being so captivated by your imagination that you can’t sleep. If you’ve ever been there, it’s actually kind of a lovely...

Of the original Omega trilogy, it’s always the 2914 that’s the odd man out. It may not have the sexy car racing and moon landing image of the Speedmaster or the diving practicality and Royal Navy pedigree the Seamaster offers, but it’s every bit the watch those other two are....

If everything Cosmograph is what gets you turned on, and you happen to be an American, I’m sorry for what I’m about to do. Nothing else come close to this 6238. With dial marked simply as ‘Rolex Chronograph’, as opposed to a movie credit scroll of modernity, a smooth, scale-less...

Enamel dials are a dying art. Only a handful of watchmakers still attempt the process and in Switzerland it’s just Donzé Cadrans who still specialize in enamel dials independent of any manufacture. But the white enamel dials of the ref. 2526 are quite unlike any other. They are far creamier...

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I’m not so sure. Science has spent a lot of time having people rate faces or physical attributes in order to approximate just what humans find beautiful in others. Product designers of large corporations, too, will ask thousands of...

From lilac to yellow, Stella dials are ‘in’, whatever that means. Every time I see a great one come up for sale these days, and the accompanying punchy ask, the ‘so hot right now’ Zoolander meme comes immediately to mind. I normally totally eschew anything fashionable; fashion is of the...

From the very start, the Polaris was a dive watch quite unlike any other. If any watchmaker knowns how to make a fashionably late entrance, it’s la grande maison, JLC. Diving watches with their extreme water resistance and externally rotating bezel were all the rage by the second half of...

There’s a reason every watchmaker under the sun is trying to get Kari to make dials for them. Names you wouldn’t expect like Gronefeld, Moritz Grossman, Petermann Bedat, Sylvain Pinaud, and many others have leveraged Voutilainen’s dial making arm, Comblémine, to great effect. Many have made the argument that this...

This is just a Speedmaster in the same way that Daniels was just a watchmaker; true, but it sort of isn’t, because it’s so much more than that. The BA 145.022 was not just the first solid gold Speedmaster, but intersects with actual space history much more significantly than just...