Traveling through Switzerland by train means frequently sighting the source of Mondaine’s minimalist watch dial named for the Federal Swiss Railways (SBB).
At every train station you’ll see an easy-to-read black-and-white-dial clock originally designed by Hans Hilfiker in 1944 when he was working for the SBB. The design was enhanced in 1947 with the addition of a paddle-shaped seconds hand based on the stationmaster’s hand-held train signal.
The newest Mondaine EVO2 Automatic.
While today Mondaine features primarily quartz-powered models built using sustainable materials, the Swiss watchmaker recently gave its EVO2 Automatic collection (originally created in 1986) a design update, adding rounder curves that reach around the case to seamlessly fold into a clear caseback, exposing a nicely SBB-branded Sellita automatic movement.
Mondaine has also refined the case lugs and has carefully updated EVO2’s crown to balance the watch’s design.
The newest Mondaine EVO2 models, with their genuine and classic Swiss-design dial, are available in 35mm and 40mm case sizes, are offered with a choice of a black or red straps ($665) or on a steel mesh bracelet ($720).
Seiko’s partnership with the U.S.-based sports clothing and accessories brand Rowing Blazers, announced earlier this summer, resulted in three colorful automatic Seiko 5 Sports watch designs. Two of the watches are limited editions and one model is an ongoing ‘special edition.’
The Seiko 5 Sport-Rowing Blazers trio.
The collaboration offers three distinctive bezels on a 42.5mm steel case with a black Seiko 5 Sports day-date dial with its crown at 4 o’clock. The collaboration includes an unusual red and white seconds hand alongside the Seiko 5’s characteristic wide hour and minute hands.
Also new here is the Rowing Blazers logo on the dial. Inside Seiko fits its ultra-reliable automatic Caliber 4R36 with 41-hour power reserve.
The collection, developed in collaboration with Rowing Blazers founder and creative director Jack Carlson and Seiko’s product development team, features three unidirectional bezel designs: a checkered rally pattern (SRPG49), a red zigzag Rowing Blazers motif (SRPG51) and a four-color red, blue, yellow and green design (SRPG53).
(See our interview with Carlson below for insight into how and why he designed the Seiko-Rowing Blazers collection.)
The latter design is on the special edition model that is not limited in number. Seiko includes a rainbow, green or black nylon strap with each steel bracelet watch.
“Collaborating with Seiko is a dream come true,” says Rowing Blazers founder Jack Carlson. “I have a small collection of both new and vintage Seikos, and I’m obsessed with the brand. This is our first real foray into the world of watches — though we often sell vintage Seikos on our site — and I couldn’t imagine a better partnership.”
As a bonus, each watch is emblazoned on its caseback with a skeleton as a reminder that time flies (a memento mori). Price: $495.
Seiko’s Seismic Shift
By James Henderson
By the time you will read this, what has been perhaps one of the most seismic shifts in the ever-growing watch subculture that is the Seiko 5 Sport series will have already happened. In fairness, there have been and will continue to be Seiko 5 Sports models put out in limited edition series. That being said, the majority of them are targeted to a decidedly wider, easier to sell-to demographic.
More to the point, Rowing Blazers has built its fan base (I am a proud member) by decidedly swimming against the current of the obvious. So while it would have been easy to take a basic watch and throw the Rowing Blazers name on it, the Rowing Blazers Seiko 5 capsule did something more.
Rowing Blazers founder Jack Carlson and vintage watch expert Eric Wind rolled up their sleeves and came up with not one, not two, but three unique watches that got watch fans in North America and beyond so worked up that they sold out faster than Wonka bars when everyone was looking for golden tickets.
Although your best chance to get one of these nifty time machines is to scour the various secondary market places, the powers that be here at Isochron Media thought you might enjoy a bit of background on what has proven to be the Seiko 5 equivalent of what happened when the guy said “What if we sliced the bread before we sold it?”
Not unlike when Smith met Wesson, you and Eric Wind have a bit of a story. How did you two meet?
Jack Carlson – Eric and I met on the first day of our freshman year in college, at Georgetown in 2005. We became fast friends. I even persuaded Eric to try out for the rowing team. Eric’s rowing career was brief, but we remained great friends. We were both in the School of Foreign Service; Eric was studying Farsi, and I was studying Chinese.
After Georgetown, I did a PhD at Oxford in archaeology, and while I was there, Eric popped over for a year to do a one-year MBA. I was honored to be the best man at Eric’s wedding to his amazing wife Christine. Aside from being a great friend, Eric has also been my watch consigliere and a great supporter of the Rowing Blazers brand since we launched four years ago. Eric sources and curates many of the vintage watches we sell at Rowing Blazers, and, of course, we also worked together on the Seiko collaboration!
What was the inspiration for the capsule?
I love Seiko, and I’ve been a vintage Seiko collector for a while now. So, it was an honor to have the opportunity to work together. I wanted everything we created to feel timeless, classic, and wearable. But I also wanted them to be fun, a little unexpected, and a little irreverent.
Color and pattern are very important to Rowing Blazers as a brand; and I wanted the capsule to reflect that. The four-color bezel was just something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. It’s so simple, but also fun and unique. It’s a very ‘90s vibe, very nostalgic, like a lot of what we do at Rowing Blazers.
The Rally bezel is inspired by some of my favorite vintage Seikos. Whenever we collaborate with a brand with a rich history and heritage like Seiko, I always try to tap into that history, and to bring some aspects of it that might not be getting a lot of love or attention currently to the surface. And the zig-zag artillery stripe is one of our brand codes. We’ve never rendered it in a circular format before, but it came out brilliantly.
Why the Seiko 5?
The Seiko 5 Sports are a great canvas to work on. We can do a lot of fun things, and the result is still classic, wearable, and a relatively accessible price point, which I think is great for our first watch collaboration.
Are there possible future collaborations?
Yes! Several exciting things in the works! Stay tuned!
Specifications: Seiko 5 Sports Rowing Blazers
(Limited Edition of 500 pieces (SRPG49/SRPG51) and Special Edition (SRPG53)
Movement: Automatic Caliber 4R36, 21,600 vph, power reserve of approximately 41 hours.
Case: 42.5mm steel with limited edition screw-down see-through caseback, water-resistant to 100 meters.
Dial: Black with day-date, LumiBrite hands and markers, red-striped seconds hand, limited edition screw down see-through caseback.
Bracelet and strap: Stainless steel with tri-fold push-button release clasp. Additional green nylon strap included with SRPG49, additional multi-color nylon strap included with SRPG53 and additional black nylon strap included with SRPG53.
Tutima recently added a green dial to its M2 Chronograph Commando collection. When it debuted late last year, this watch was available only with a black dial.
The relatively new addition to this serious aviation chronograph collection veers from conventional pilot colors with a stylish yet still subtle green dégradé dial.
Around the dial however Tutima retains its solid 46mm cushion-shaped titanium case, sapphire crystal and Caliber Tutima 521, a highly customized ETA Valjoux 7750.
Tutima has re-engineered the sturdy caliber to track minutes and seconds via a large center sweep hand, and hours with a subdial. The modified dial train, a proprietary Tutima development, offers a cleaner alternative to more traditional two-subdial or three-subdial chronographs.
Even less conventional are the two chronograph pushers, which lie fairly hidden in their otherwise usual locations astride the crown. The design emphasizes its overall sleek profile. From a distance one might not identify the M2 Commando as a chronograph, a characteristic not lost on Tutima as it so successfully pairs real function with its own somewhat minimalist style.
Prices: $4,900 on a Kevlar strap with titanium clasp; $5,300 on a solid titanium bracelet with folding clasp.
Chronoswiss offers multiple shades of black on a new model within its Open Gear ReSec regulator collection. The Lucerne-based independent watchmaker combines a range of technical finishing techniques to create interesting optical effects on the dark new Open Gear ReSec Black Ice.
The new Chronoswiss Open Gear ReSec Black Ice.
The 44mm watch, with a now familiar multi-layer regulator dial, onion crown and fluted bezel, operates on two levels. On one level is the plate for the bridges, screws and wheels. A second, upper level features screwed-on skeletonized train wheel bridges and a fascinating funnel-shaped hour display.
Named for its premier function (ReSec stands for Retrograde Seconds), the watch’s jumping seconds hand operates in a half-circle, leaping from the thirty seconds position back to start its arc to complete counting each minute. The fan-shaped bridge holding the 30-second retrograde function defines the lower half of the dial.
With its all-black canvas, the Open Gear ReSec Black Ice allows all the luminous hour and minute markers to shine especially clearly. Luminous hands rotate over what appears to be coarse, shiny black sand.
Chronoswiss explains that this eye-catching dial effect requires “heavy metal industrial operations” involving structure-cutting laser beams and a heavy pressure stamping procedure before the solid metal is dunked into a galvanic bath.
“This watch is like fifty shades of black, and the different blacks really contrast each other thanks to the different structures, finishes and coatings,” says Chronoswiss designer Maik Panziera. “Some surfaces are much darker than others; despite the monochrome palette they almost appear like different colors.”
The primary technique Chronoswiss uses here is DLC coating, found on the black matte case and the polished screws securing the bridges. The bridge holding the 30-second retrograde function is sandblasted with a black galvanization. And the subtle contrasts between these two finishes nicely enhance the Black Ice’s multi-level effect.
Chronoswiss also took time to ensure that the back of the watch matched the front. Thus, the rotor of the automatic C.301 movement, visible through the clear caseback, is galvanized black, then skeletonized and finally finished with côtes de Genève.
The rotor of the automatic C.301 movement, visible through the clear caseback, is galvanized black and skeletonized.
As a bonus, Chronoswiss offers the new watch attached to a hand-stitched neoprene strap with a leather base. Chronoswiss will make fifty examples of the Open Gear ReSec Black Ice. Price: $10,600.
IWC expands its Portofino collection this week with the Portofino Chronograph 39 (Ref. IW3914), a new design debuting as a set of three 39mm steel-cased chronographs.
One of three 39mm steel-cased references in the new IWC Portofino Chronograph 39 collection.
The new, smaller-cased models complement IWC’s existing 42mm Portofino Chronograph. The new trio’s dial design emphasizes Portofino’s minimalistic layout with an even cleaner look than previous chronographs in the collection. With a smaller dial, the new models do not include the day/date display at 3 o’clock or the seconds subdial at 9 o’clock found on the larger chronographs.
The elegant Portofino often flies under the radar at IWC, which is best known for its technical focus (Ingenieur and Da Vinci), its range of larger aviation collections (Pilot and Big Pilot) and its nautical (Aquatimer and Portugieser) collections.
IWC has enriched Portofino in recent years to extend the collection’s unisex appeal, notably with an attractive series of Portofino Automatic models offered in 34mm, 37mm and 40mm cases. Throughout the Portofino collection IWC maintains a clean dial design characterized by the spare use of Roman numerals set between simple applied hour markers.
Here two totalizers (at 6 o’clock and 12 o’clock) balance the dial, each partially hiding the display’s only two Roman numerals. A very thin seconds track frames the dial’s primary elongated markers. Inside IWC fits its Caliber 79350, built by IWC from a very highly modified ETA Valjoux 7750.
IWC offers three steel-cased references in the new Portofino Chronograph 39 collection. Dial options are black, green or silver-plate. All models are fitted with top-notch alligator straps. Price: $5,900.
Mondaine has also refined the case lugs and has carefully updated EVO2’s crown to balance the watch’s design.
Also new here is the Rowing Blazers logo on the dial. Inside Seiko fits its ultra-reliable automatic Caliber 4R36 with 41-hour power reserve.
