echo/neutra Brings Back the 1956 Chrono GMT in Cappuccino and Purple

Most of the attention echo/neutra gets goes to the Rivanera, its small titanium take on a rectangular dress watch. But I fell for the Italian brand back when they made divers, GMTs and ceramic pilot's watches. That's why I always kind of wanted one of their 1956 watches. Most particularly, the 1956 Chrono GMT, which put a chronograph and a second time zone into a good looking vintage watch. The watch has since disappeared from the collection, but echo/neutra is bringing it back in two fantastic new colors – Cappuccino and Purple.

The steel case is familiar and measures 40mm wide and 14.8mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 46mm and 20mm wide lugs. Some of that height comes from the heavily domed sapphire crystal, but this is still a tall watch no matter how you look at it. The front and sides are brushed, with a wide polished bevel running down the lugs, making this look way more expensive than it is. A fixed ceramic bezel has a telemeter scale, the solid caseback has a large "1956" stamped in the middle, and water resistance is 100 meters.

Cappuccino pairs a brown dial with lighter brown sub-dials, indices and hands, and uses turquoise for the GMT hand and the seconds accents. Purple gets a deep wine shade, close to burgundy, for the dial with black sub-dials, pink-purple hour and minute hands (how cool are those?), and red for the GMT and seconds. Like previous variants, you get the 30-minute counter at 12, the 12-hour counter at six, and the running seconds and day/night indicator together at nine.

Inside is the hand-wound Sellita calibre SW532M b Elaboré, beating at 4Hz with a 62-hour power reserve. Cappuccino comes on a light brown suede strap with turquoise stitching, while Purple comes on a deep purple leather strap, both with a steel pin buckle.

The echo/neutra 1956 Chrono GMT goes on sale today, September 16th at 6PM CET and it's priced at €1,970. See more on the echo/neutra website when the watches go live.