Category: Brands

Hands On – The Panerai PAM01467 Luminor BiTempo Titanium DLC New York Limited Edition

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Panerai PAM01467 Luminor BiTempo Titanium DLC new York Limited Edition

The ultimate strength of the 44mm Luminor, however, is its ability to take on vastly different treatments and always look great. It’s a design that Panerai has long steered in many directions, from fully polished steel time-only models with softened retro colorways to carbon Luminors with pops of primary colors across complicated chronographs. With the limited edition model in hand here, the 44mm Luminor has been given a chic grayed-out treatment to celebrate the opening of Panerai’s new flagship store in Manhattan. With a nod to the Big Apple area code, there are 212 examples for sale of the PAM01467.

Swifty-Fathoms, Swatchpain – How The Nicknames of the Swatch x Blancpain Fifty-Fathoms Mock The Swatch Group

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Swifty Fathoms

Collectively naming a watch has become a way to induce its significance as an object of popular culture. Most watch nicknames are affectionately playful; consider Seiko’s Shogun, Grand Seiko’s Snowflake, Omega’s Speedy, or Rolex’s sugary soda pop GMTs. But when it came to the SWATCH x Blancpain Fifty-Fathoms, the proposed nicknames seemed, if not exactly unaffectionate, certainly devised to cast some measure of disdain onto the thing.

Hands On – The Panerai PAM914

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PAM914 Panerai

Panerai releasing the PAM914 is like the Rolling Stones playing “Satisfaction.” It was just an undeniably dead-center kind of watch, the one you might have sent out to space to represent Panerai to aliens. It’s the Panerai that didn’t have some feature you wished was or wasn’t there. Here’s why this watch is the perfect Panera.

Curating the Collection – The Return of the Doxa SUB 300 Searambler -1970s Ugly Is Back

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Doxa SUB 300 Searambler Dive Watch

For me, the Searambler is the weirdest Doxa of them all—less sporty than orange or black, and totally ready for bare chested-Dads of the 1970s. The Searambler is the watch for men who smoked cigarettes with their wetsuits tied around their waist as they discussed the next dive plan. The Searambler is the watch stuck in a drawer in a lakeside cabin in northern Michigan ready to be discovered by some yet-unborn great-grandchild who will hold it as a genuine antique, a lost family heirloom this great-grandchild may see on his great-grandfather’s wrist in a faded Kodachrome photograph in a shoe box. In this hypothetical photograph, grandad has a cigarette in one hand and the backside of his bikini-clad wife (that’s great grandma?!) in the other. Their carefree smiles and sun-burnt skin suggest a pre-apocalyptic moment when hope and happiness weren’t so rare—a mid-century moment when technology was still a good and simple, not some self-taught AI unleashed to consume its maker. The SUB 300 Searambler is a watch a man could wear while water-skiing without a life preserver, maybe even with a beer in one hand.

Field Report – The Turtle That Crawled Through Chernobyl – A Destroyed Seiko 6309-7040

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Seiko 6309-7040, The Turtle That Crawled Through Chernobyl

I take a look down at the Seiko 6309 Turtle, the lume long since faded. I turn the Seiko towards a window. I am almost in complete darkness, my camera seeing more than I can. The Seiko’s bezel indicates that my hour is almost up. I retrace my steps from empty room to empty room and find our fixer and our driver smoking cigarettes at the entrance to the hospital. 

Hands-On – Bremont Broadsword Recon 40mm Limited Edition Military Watch

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Bremont Broadsword Recon Dirty Dozen Watch

One of the problems I often have with two-piece watch cases this thick is that the sides can be super boring or, as the kids say, “slab sided.” The 40mm Broadsword case is 11.9mm tall, which is the exact same height as Tudor’s Black Bay 58, a watch I don’t buy precisely because the thing is so “slab-sided.” (The new BB54 is better, I hear, but I digress.) The Broadsword case is simply not slab-sided. It’s actually quite elegant and interesting.

Hands-On – Nodus Sector GMT Watch

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nodus sector gmt

The Sector GMT features a twenty-four-hour hand and scale in a clearly delineated sector on the dial. That scale is raised by a step and I was delighted by the legibility of the second time zone. This is in sharp contrast to the more common long GMT hand stretching to the bezel. I finally understood the sector design advantage. The chapter ring subtly breaks up the six AM/PM with a light blue that matches the GMT hand. It’s a remarkably legible design.

Hands-On – Nodus Sector Deep 39mm Left-Hand Drive (LHD) Dive Watch

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nodus sector deep dive watch 39mm

I feel lost these days considering a dive watch costing $575. Seiko had been my benchmark; alas, no longer. As the 2020s roll on, Seiko divers have gone up in cost, if not quality, while random Chinese brands are making better Seikos for $179 than Seiko makes for $900. Now in the $500-range, we’ve got Bulova, Timex, Lorier, Vaer, Vero, Yema, Benrus, Vero, Boldr, Unimatic, Raven, and, yes, Nodus to choose from, among many others. At one time when suggesting a cheap diver, all you had to say was. “Just get an SKX007,” and now I feel like you need to lay out a massive road map and begin plotting a course through late capitalism itself.

Hands-On – Moser Endeavor 42mm Perpetual Calendar Tantalum & Steel With Blue Fume Dial

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Moser Perpetual Calendar Endeavor 42mm Tantalum Steel

I can’t think of another serious watch brand—Swiss, nonetheless—of which one can genuinely—that is, without Irony—say: Fucking brilliant, mate…really taking the piss. And it is certainly elevating my foul mood to be awash in thoughts of Moser on this shit morning. This is what I turn to watches for, exactly. I aspire to be as unlike the inhabitants of Hollywood as possible. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool East Coast Aesthete, high-minded and always a little angry at the world for not being as smart as I think I am. I enjoy the illusion that I am an independent thinker, and so when I see something like this Moser Perpetual Calendar awaiting judgment on my desk, I smile knowing that this watch is not going to insult my intelligence, and that it may even challenge it.