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Best Super NEWS Watches
Inside The Design: The Case For Better Watch Typography
When you're a designer, some rules are non-negotiable. Chief among them? Details matter. Even the seemingly insignificant ones C the ones others might overlook in pursuit of efficiency or frugality. Exquisitely crafted and extravagantly priced, the Parisian fashion house Herms has, shall we say, never been accused of skimping. Which is why, when it began designing its Slim d'Herms watch back in 2012, it obsessed over something many watchmakers ignore: Typography. At the time, Herms' artistic director, Pierre-Alexis Dumas, and creative director, Philippe Delhotal, approached designer Philippe Apeloig about adding a special detail to the Slim's dial. Like all He...
Sunday Rewind: Why You Need To Be Paying Attention To Citizen Right Now
A little over a week ago, Citizen announced its latest collection of watches, including the eye-catching Citizen Mechanical Caliber 0200, with its brand new movement and decidedly contemporary styling. It's a very different kind of watch from what we've seen the brand creating over the past few years, and it's one that collectors everywhere should take note of. But, if you dig back in the HODINKEE archive, you'll notice that our own Joe Thompson read the tea leaves back in 2019, penning this incredible piece on why Citizen would be a serious brand-to-watch as it entered its second century of watchmaking. As usual, Joe was way ahead of the curve. ...
Grails: Rarified Air: Why A Wacky Gold '70s Pilot Watch Is My All-Time Grail
Produced from 1969 to 1977, the Omega flightmaster C lowercase F C was marketed and labeled as a pilot's watch. But it's designed for far more than just aviation. It quietly held its own against its contemporaries in just about every tool-watch category. It featured a chronograph, a second time-zone, an AM/PM indicator, and boasted 120m of water resistance all in a case carved from Swedish steel. While the Speedmaster was selected by NASA for spacefaring applications, on the other side of the iron curtain, the flightmaster was selected by ROSCOSMOS to accompany cosmonauts. Alexi Leonov famously wore one. The Rolex GMT-Master is perhap...
The Sports Section: We're Picking Our Final Four Based On The Coaches' Watches
The 2021 NCAA Tournament begins today, and since there was no tournament in 2020 (unless you count our own Watch Madness), hoops fans are drooling. Here at HODINKEE, we fill out our brackets a little differently. Forget field-goal percentage and defensive ratings we're into case size and complications. Here are the four teams we'll be pulling for, one from each seeded region in the tournament, selected based on the best watches we've seen their coaches wear. Granted, we'd prefer to pick based on the players. But the coaches make the big bucks and the players, unfortunately, do not. We look forward to the day when that changes and will be ready with a bracket for their wrist game when it do...
As part of a recently launched collection of green-themed versions of some of the brand's most beloved watches, Audemars Piguet has announced the first-ever platinum Royal Oak "Jumbo" with a green sunburst dial. That's right: Those who were simply green with envy towards anyone who managed to snag 2019's "salmon adjacent" 152020BC can now commemorate the feeling with a truly striking smoked green dial. As the modern expression of the original Royal Oak format, the 15202 is a hugely popular reference, and this will undoubtedly be a hot-ticket item for anyone with their eyes on the current scene surrounding Audemars Piguet. Initial...
Introducing: Montblanc's New 'Lime Gold' Steps Into the Limelight
These days, you don't hear "outdoor lifestyle" and think of 19th-century fonts, a luxurious gold case, cathedral hands, and a sunray-finished dial. But once upon a time, Minerva, the maison that imbued Montblanc with all its know-how, specialized in producing watches meant for exploring the globe in the early 20th century. The current Montblanc 1858 line is a modern riff on this era of Minerva history. And now, Montblanc has updated the line with a watch produced in Montblanc's proprietary gold alloy called Lime Gold. It's made of 18K gold, silver, and iron, and it has a subtle green luster to it that complements the fizzy green ...
HODINKEE Radio: What Watches Can Learn From Streetwear C And Vice Versa
Subscribe to the show: (Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, TuneIn). Already heard it once or twice? Please leave a short review, and tell us which guests we should have on! Streetwear and watches have more in common with every passing day. They're both all about collectability. They both rely increasingly on Internet buzz and drop culture. Their resale markets are both booming. And they're both full of complexities, contradictions, and surprises. Take, for example, Rhuigi Villase?or, the founder of the decidedly luxurious LA-based label Rhude. When you picture a young streetwear designer rolling around Beve...
Introducing: The KITH For G-Shock GM-6900 Rainbow (Live Pics & Pricing)
KITH, the famed downtown New York retailer and apparel label known for rare sneakers and nostalgic collaborations, has a big watch dropping early next week. The company's founder, Ronnie Fieg, very often looks to '90s New York C where he came of age C for inspiration. So it comes as little surprise that KITH's latest G-Shock collaboration is based on that most classic of '90s G-Shock profiles, the 6900, which turned 25 last year. This is actually the third time that KITH has teamed up with G-Shock on a robust 6900. The first collaboration featured a white resin case and rose-gold colored accents in th...
Introducing: Rainbow-Bright Breitlings
After spending the past winter in the quarantine doldrums, who could be blamed for craving something uplifting and colorful on their wrist? This trio of new Breitlings delivers sporty style with a sultry attitude that mixes masculine and feminine elements in good measure. Capsule collections like this allow Breitling to harness the power of exclusivity without getting into numbered limited editions. Produced for a short time, usually a few months, a capsule collection seeks to tell a specific story rooted in the history of its core family, all while injecting a sense of urgency to get one before they're gone. While the Chronomat Autom...
Interview: The Man Documenting Artisanal Watchmaking History
Launched earlier this month, the Persistence of Memory is an all-digital horological exhibit that surveys the most important people and watches in the history of independent watchmaking.Through impressive scholarship and some seriously jaw-dropping macro photography, the exhibition draws its viewers close to the watches that helped to define modern independent watchmaking in its post-Quartz Crisis infancy. "I think we are at a particularly interesting moment in time in horology," says Mike Tay, the Singapore-based group managing director of The Hour Glass, who curated the exhibition. "With horology, very much like art history, yo...
Happenings: Mark Cho To Lecture At The Horological Society Of New York
Is there such a thing as an ideal watch size? How many people really think they have small wrists? What is the relationship between perception and preference? In his career as a clothier having watch-related conversations with his customers, Mark Cho, co-founder of The Armoury and co-owner of Drake's, noticed more than half of his clients uttered the same phrase: "I have small wrists." It was a curious phenomenon, which prompted Cho to conduct a survey from 2018 to 2021 called "The Ideal Watch Size Survey" to try and understand what was going on. For the Horological Society of New Yorks April 2021 lecture, Cho will present his findings to these questions and more. ...
Just Because: I Made A Song With A Metronome Watch
A few weeks ago, I was spinning the bezel on my dive watch for no particular reason C as one does C and began contemplating the very notion of a tool watch. For the most part, they are, well, tools. They're dedicated to a singular purpose. One of my favorite examples of a tool watch in that vein is the chronograph with a pulsometer scale. Effectively, its sole purpose is to measure a heart rate. Sure, you can use the basic chronograph function whenever you like but, in theory, the watch is pretty much dedicated to this one pursuit. Most modern-day tool watches, in the mechanical sense, are basically homages to the tool watches of yore. We have smart devices now. ...
Introducing: The Omega Seamaster 300 Bronze Gold
Bronze is a material which, over the last couple of decades, has increasingly been used for watch cases, in both limited editions and regular production models. Bronze at its most basic is an alloy of two metals, copper and tin, and it has an age all to itself C the Bronze Age, in which its toughness helped to jump-start human civilization. Its biggest weakness is also an asset C bronze tends to form an area of surface corrosion, but that actually protects the underlying metal and prevents further corrosion. One of the most important uses for bronze historically, and even today, is for marine fittings as it resists saltwater corrosion very well. In watch cases, marine-grade aluminum bronzes ...
Introducing: The New Omega Seamaster 300
In the early morning hours, Omega dropped a flurry of new releases. Among them is a refresh of its vintage-inspired Seamaster line, paying homage to the brand's first dive watch from the 1950s and 1960s. This is the new Omega Seamaster 300. It has the same old school charm, and the same blue and black dial variants, only it's been brought closer to the original, both in spirit and aesthetic. While the new Seamaster 300 has a vintage soul, it has a modern heart, including METAS chronometer certification and a current-gen co-axial escapement. Initial Thoughts ...
Introducing: The Omega Seamaster 300M Black Black
No, that repeat isn't a typo. This really is the "Black Black," and it's easy to see why: Every single element of this watch that can be rendered in black ceramic is rendered in black ceramic. It's not just the 43.5mm case that's done in ZrO2 (zirconium oxide), even the crown and the HEV are made from black ceramic. They might as well throw another "Black" in the name and call it the Triple Black, because it even comes on a black rubber strap. Only the caliber 8806 (a caliber 8800 without a date function) inside and the crystal are made from a material other than black ceramic. Zirconium oxide is normally white; Omega turns it black with the addition of an iron p...
Bring Order To Your Strap Collection
I get asked a lot about how I prefer to store my straps, and my answers have evolved over the years. When I first got into watches (and learned that I don't generally love watch bracelets), I could've stored my collection in a freezer bag or a spare bit of Tupperware, but those days are long gone. Today, I need something more constructor grade. Before we strap in, I absolutely promise that this is not buzz marketing for Dewalt (nor is HODINKEE planning a push into handyman space). I bought the following organizer assuming it would fit into my current collection of modular tool storage, but I read the product description wrong (like, not at all) and this specific ...
Just Because: My Trusty Old Grand Seiko Is Still Shockingly Accurate
When I buy a mechanical watch, I know what I'm getting into: I have no illusions of quartz-like accuracy. I have a phone. You have a phone. We all have a phone. If what I'm buying is not a straight-up certified chronometer, I hope merely for reasonably good timekeeping and to be spared the sinking feeling that arises when one senses he's purchased a lemon. But every once in a while, a watch sneaks up with such impressive accuracy that I won't shut up?about it. This happened the other day when I broke out an old friend, my Grand Seiko SBGM221, from its safety-deposit-box-sized cell. Accuracy is well wo...
In-Depth: How Leonard Cohen Lived Between The Hour And The Age
Lead image: Antonio Olmos Fifty years ago this month, sunk in a deep depression, Leonard Cohen released his third studio album, Songs of Love and Hate. It had been two years since 1969's Songs from a Room, which C as was often the case through Cohen's long career C critics couldn't easily reconcile to the shape of pop. Either Cohen was a rare divine creature who shone a prayerful light through frailty and longing, or he wrote dirges that, as Rolling Stone indecorously claimed, "won't have them dancing in the streets." Songs of Love and Hate stayed the course. Over fluttering Spanish guitar, 36-year-old Cohen hangs his head in self-rec...
If variety is the spice of life, consider this week's vintage selection a mean curry, a bowl of chili, or jerk chicken. Honestly, that analogy is confusing. Would it be many different spices or just generally spicy food? The idiom is believed to have been created by William Cowper in his 1785 poem The Task, which is less a poem and more a book; one of those "poems."The lines read: "Variety's the very spice of life / That gives it all its flavour."So, in variety, we're talking flavor. Spanning 11 brands and five decades, this week's vintage selection is firmly in Flavortown. 1970s Heuer 'Pre-V...
Four + One: This Country Singer's Watch Collection Charts A Career In Music
Hunter Hayes has been nominated for five Grammys over his ten-year career C a pretty good average. He's reached number one on Top Country Albums and number seven on Billboard 200, with hit singles like "One Good Reason" and "Wanted." Just last week, he released a new song called "If You Change Your Mind." In other words, he's an artist who has a lot to celebrate, and one of the ways he does that is through his watches. A decade ago, when Hayes, now 29, first moved to Nashville from Louisiana to pursue a career as a country singer, he had a collection of Fossils. He still admires the early pieces that got him into watches, but today, he's got a grown-up collection...