If a watch-curious alien were to come down to Earth, you’d have a very hard time explaining why vintage watches are more appealing than their modern counterparts. Generally speaking, things get objectively better over time. That is, with one exception: tritium. The warm glow of a well aged 3H (tritium...

About five years ago, I encountered my first Yves Klein Royal Oak at a collector meetup in San Francisco. I made an all-too-obvious audible gasp when I clocked it. My girlfriend of the time, who was starting to learn the ropes, said, ‘So that’s just a blue dial Royal Oak,...

Whoever came up with idea to make the three subdial registers of the A386 tri-color is a genius. In watch design, the gold standard is being distinctive enough to be recognized from across a room or mid-distance. Most meaningful designs nail this trick, but there are surprisingly few. Why does...

The Crash is that sole watch whose trajectory best encapsulates the last two decades of watch collecting as a whole. In the year 2000, very few would be able to describe the differences between a London and Paris Crash. Today, anyone who’s aware of Loupe This has that covered. It...

There is no greater tell that a watch is firmly in the collector zeitgeist than when Hodinkee writes a guide on its genealogy. But when the Fifty Fathoms passed that milestone passed last month, it seemed perhaps a bit overdue? I mean this is really the first dive watch as...

Round pushers on a 13ZN and you’re definitively in the cognoscenti, no matter where you’re turning up. Raj Chaudhuri wrote an exceptional article for ACM last year titled ‘Is the Longines 13ZN still collectible?’. The answer, if community enthusiasm is anything to go by, is yes. It certainly deserves to...

If you’ve been shopping for a toaster recently, you’ll know most people buy a Cuisinart. Alternatively, you could buy a 600 USD Wolf that is milled from steel, toasts four slices at once, senses where slices are loaded to self-center, and will automatically recognize bagels from bread. The one review...

It’s a bit bizarre how a single material change can elevate an entire watch: a steel Patek, Sodalite Daytona dial, tantalum JLC (long time readers, I appreciate you), or even brass movements vs gold for our Journe friends. Did you know Rolex made a few steel Day-Dates prototypes? Bet that...

UAE dial Rolexes are about a desirable as it gets, in any context. But the vast majority of signatures are on Datejusts and Day-Dates, the dressier watches. A steel sport Rolex with UAE enamel at 6 is remarkable in every regard. This is particularly the case for the 1675 GMT-Master,...

Before Cartier became fully married to quartz in the late 80s and well before the CPCP-era that resurrected their mechanical watchmaking, one or two mechanical Santos slipped through the cracks, hanging on for dear life. One is the ref. 2960, a large-cased Carrée (french for square, or straight-lugged) Santos with...

The first time you lay eyes on this Mido, it’s almost as if it’s playing a trick on you like some punk kid. Take a second, it’ll come to you. There are two chronograph pushers. And zero subdials. Huh? In much the same way that some early 60s dive watches...

At a collector meetup last year, I encountered a very tan, thin, well-dressed Italian man. He had the kind of skin that let you know he’d spent every day of summer strolling around outside Capri. His glasses were Tom Ford. The calfskin boots he wore had been on foot at...

To some, this is one of the most blasphemous watches to come out of Le Brassus. It wears the name Royal Oak, but wasn’t designed by Genta. It’s not even a mechanical watch, no, it hails from the height of quartz. The ref. 6005 Rectangular Royal Oak is part uncanny...

In watches, as most luxuries, there is often an asymptotic relationship between the amount a watch commands and the extra value you receive. In tangible terms, it means this: a 20K watch will not give you twice the enjoyment of a 10K watch, often it may give you about 1.5x...

If you didn’t know watches, you’d probably think being nicknamed ‘frying pan’ was an insult. But when Padellone (the Italian) precedes Patek Philippe, you’re looking at what might just be the most elegant perpetual calendar ever. At the very least, it was the world’s first scaled production, self-wound perpetual calendar....

China has 160 cities with over a million people. Their intense public transport spending has meant the entire country is connected by high speed rail, cars are not needed. China is producing everything for everyone, everywhere. The more mathematically minded, on the spectrum-types are working extremely hard (perhaps at gunpoint?)...

The subtlety of one color can make a watch. I feel, perhaps too strongly, that British racing green may in fact be the classiest hue to ever exist, full stop. This isn’t some childish James Bond Aston fascination or anglophilic pandering, no. On its own merits, the precise deep green...

It is an unfortunate truth that, in our little world, hommage is often a dirty word. This doesn’t have to be the case, it’s just what happens when inspiration is taken lazily. Too many companies can easily copy design elements, grab a Miyota, and call it a day. But the...