Category: STRUCTURAL – Top Story

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Podcast – Insights E37 – I Fell Into The Rolex Black Hole

Is SWATCH’s BIOCERAMIC anything more than a petrolium-based plastic? Find out in this episode as Allen shares his investigation into this divisive material, its history, its current context, its chemical makeup, and even an email about it from a SWATCH representative.

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

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

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.

Why We Built The Watch Space App

Without the Watchville app, the global watch community no longer had a central hub, an intersection through which much of this community’s endless output would pass all day every day so that the siloing effects of digital life didn’t divide our community the way it has divided nearly every community I can think of over the past decade or so. This is why you’ll find The Watch Space app is so inclusive.

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

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.

Hands-On – Reservoir Sonomaster Chronograph

Reservoir Sonomaster Chronograph 42mm Swiss Watch

I think it’s fair to say that any watch which replicates another instrument is a kind of gimmick. Dashboard watches come immediately to mind, as do more specific gauges like altimeters and speedometers, and even digital recreations of vintage video game consoles, and so on. Rarely do I find these gimmicks interesting or original, but the Reservoir Sonomaster Chronograph is an exception to my general disregard for such timepieces.

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

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

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.