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...

Everyone wants to feel special. But when Cartier agree to make you dial to your specification, you actually are, by definition. We all aspire to be VVIPs of Cartier, that’s the simple truth. But the kind of buying history that requires is enough to make an oil Sheikh gasp. So...

Neo-vintage is not just collectable in Patek, VC, or AP; the era has more practical offerings as well. One, largely unsung, is the transitional 76100 Tudor sub. The reference was in production for just a few years in the mid-to-late 80s, but the 94110 ‘Snowflake’ of the same period stole...

A small but vocal section of the vintage watch collecting community has for years tried to make the case that Enicar’s sport watches from the 1960s and 1970s measure up to their counterparts from Rolex and Omega. This Sherpa Jet can and should be Exhibit A in their case. This...

Zodiac’s 1960s Sea Wolf is a vintage Fifty Fathoms of the people: every bit as storied, much less recognized, and way more fun. It gets overlooked often, but the Sea Wolf was one of the earliest commercial dive watches, released in 1953 alongside the Fifty Fathoms at Basel Fair. Its...

This is a beautiful bit of autobiographical revisionist history. This is the ‘Olympic Official Timekeeper’, the most handsome of three chronographs made in homage to stopwatches which Omega used at their first olympics in 1932. Omega are so fond of a limited edition that a few gems have slipped through...

Safety has never looked so sexy. Volvo make sensible cars for sensible people. I have many friends for whom an XC90 is more akin to the family dog than a mode of transport. As someone who comes from a very Swedish family, I can assure you the Swedish do not...

To me, John Krasinski will always be the guy from The Office: affable, mild-mannered, agreeable. But have you seen his recent work? Some time around 2014, he hit what I call the Hollywood second puberty. Then came the traditional Men’s Health magazine cover, a 13 Hours of Benghazi role, and...

There is an unspoken rule, one which I’ve completely made up, in Rolex. If someone is wearing a dial without any indices, made of some exotic material, they’re doing so because they’re well enough off to advertise that they don’t need to know the time. They own it; they may...