Grand Seiko Pays Tribute To The First Manual-Winding 9S And New Watches From Tissot, Ressence, Squale And Hublot

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1/ Grand Seiko Pays Tribute To The First Manual-Winding 9S Model With The Elegance SBGW325

In 2001, Grand Seiko released the SBGW003, the first watch to use a manual-winding 9S movement. It was a simple dress watch drawn from the brand's 1960s designs, and its case is still used today in the SBGW301 and SBGW305. It was also kind of special for using Arabic numerals, which you don't see often on GS watches. The new, just released, Elegance Manual-Winding SBGW325 uses that same case and brings back the original's raised Arabic numerals. Few people outside the Grand Seiko faithful remember the SBGW003, which makes this a more interesting tribute than most.

The steel case is 37.3mm wide and 11.7mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 44.3mm, which sound like some pretty great dimensions. If only they could bring that thickness down a bit. Zaratsu polishing covers the case, a box-shaped sapphire crystal with internal anti-reflective coating sits on top, and six screws hold a sapphire caseback down. Water resistance is not great. In fact, it's so bad GS doesn't even say what it is. The website just says splash resistant. It's 30 meters, which should be much better.

The dial is a matte deep navy inspired by traditional Japanese indigo dyeing. The raised Arabic numerals were gold on the SBGW003, but are silver colored here. Faceted Dauphine hands, polished and brushed, tell the time, and gold colors shows up in two places: the seconds hand and the applied GS logo. The numerals give it more personality than the usual Grand Seiko dress dial.

Inside is the in-house calibre 9S64, the hand-wound successor to the 9S54 that powered the SBGW003. It beats at 4Hz with a 72-hour power reserve, up from the 9S54's 50 hours. Grand Seiko rates it at +5/-3 seconds per day, and the transparent caseback shows striped decoration and a concave barrel cover. Two 19mm straps come in the box, both on quick-release spring bars: a hand-dyed blue crocodile and a light grey cow leather that contrasts with the dial.

The Grand Seiko Elegance Manual-Winding SBGW325 is limited to 600 pieces, goes on sale in October and it's priced at €5,700. See more photos here and the watch on the Grand Seiko website.

2/ Tissot Fills the Most Obvious Gap in the PRX Lineup With a Quartz Chronograph

Some years now, Tissot brought the PRX back as a quartz recreation of a vintage legend, and it quickly grew into automatics, smaller sizes, gold accents and a mechanical chronograph. This is not just a full blown collection, it is one of Tissot's biggest money makers. Now it gets the version that seems most obvious. The PRX Quartz Chronograph pairs the integrated case with a three-register quartz chronograph, giving you familiar looks and same functionality at a much lower price than the mechanical chrono.

The steel case measures 41mm wide and 11.65mm thick, brushed almost everywhere, with only the round bezel that's polished. On top is a sapphire crystal and the bracelet is integrated into the case, just like the rest of the collection. The pushers are wide and square and well integrated into the case. Water resistance is 100 meters.

There are three dial variants, and all three are vertically brushed. Silver gets rose gold-colored hands, indices and sub-dial rings, black gets nickel-colored hardware, just like the blue. The three counters, date between 4 and 5 o'clock and a small PRX signature in the 6 o'clock register make for a busy dial, but it's not horribly illegible. Baton hands and applied indices are all filled with Super-LumiNova.

Tissot gives almost no movement detail, but it's actually an ETA calibre G10.212 PowerDrive: a quartz chronograph with date and an end-of-life battery indicator. The integrated steel bracelet has the wide, flat, brushed links.

The Tissot PRX Quartz Chronograph is available now and the only pricing I managed to find is in Pounds, which comes out to £430. See more photos here and the watches on the Tissot website.

3/ Ressence's Newest Art Watch Is A Maze That Solves Itself At Midnight

Ah, yes, Ressence, my quiet passion. Founded by industrial designer Benoît Mintiens in 2010, since it's start, Ressence has used ROCS, the brand's patented system of rotating discs that replaces conventional hands, and the moment I saw them I fell in love with them. Since then, they've expanded their collection to dozens of models and lately have been working on a series of Art Watches. Which has been very cool. Just look at this new Type 9 done with Belgian artist Jules Wittock, known for his incredible and massive freehand maze paintings. The mazes come to the unusual Type 9 and it's a very nice combo.

The case is 39mm wide and 11mm thick in grade 5 titanium, with or without a black DLC-coating, and weighs 42 grams with the strap. It wears fantastically on the wrist since it has super short lugs and no crown. On top is a fixed bezel with a minute track in five-minute steps, surrounding a domed sapphire crystal. The bezel is where you'll find the first Wittock intervention, with small "In" and "Out" markers, showing you where you need to start or end the maze. But good luck, since the maze is constantly on the move.

Wittock's pattern is milled into the titanium discs and filled by hand, so ROCS pulls it apart and puts it back together as the day goes on. You can have the dial in emerald green with a lacquered maze that shifts toward purple at an angle, or black. Get the green. The matching chapter ring has Arabic numerals at 3 and 9 o'clock and the Ressence hand logo at noon, and the maze creeps into the tip of the white-lacquered hour hand. Everything is lumed, maze included. The main disc turns once an hour and the hour disc once every 12, and the hidden word only appears at midnight when the glowing hands line up.

The ROCS 9 module is driven by the minute axle of a modified ETA 2892 automatic, running at 4Hz with 36 hours of power reserve. The watches come on black or white leather straps.

The Ressence Type 9 Jules Wittock is limited to 30 examples in emerald green and 30 in black, priced at CHF 20,000 without tax. See more photos here and the watches on the Ressence website.

4/ Squale Marks a Century of Galeazzi Deep-Sea Engineering With the Compact Artiglio

While Squale might not be a globally famous brand, their heritage is incredible. They've been making dive watches since the last 50s, spent decades supplying cases to other brands and made watches for many military units. They also work with civilian companies, as evident by the new Artiglio, its second collaboration with Italian underwater engineering firm DRASS Galeazzi, five years after the first. It marks 100 years since Roberto Galeazzi patented a pressure-resistant spherical structure in 1926, the technology that helped recover gold from the wreck of the SS Egypt at around 130 meters in 1932.

The steel case is 39.5mm wide, 12.6mm thick and has a lug-to-lug of 47mm. It's made out of brushed 316L with polished bevels, topped with a flat sapphire crystal, and rated to 600 meters of water resistance. Those are skin-diver proportions with a professional rating, which is quite a cool proposition. On top is an unidirectional bezel with a flat K1 mineral glass insert in Pantone 295U blue, with BGW9 Super-LumiNova numerals.

The dial uses the same blue as the bezel. Above six o'clock sits a Wet Indicator, a humidity-sensitive disc that changes color if moisture gets into the case, a warning system found on some early professional divers that are an incredible and timeless look. The applied domed indices are filled with BGW9, there's no date, and the DRASS Galeazzi diving-helmet logo is printed on the underside of the crystal so it floats right above the indicator. How cool is that.

Inside is the ETA calibre 2824-2 in Elaboré grade, beating at 4Hz with around 42 hours of power reserve. It's unexciting, but any watchmaker can service it. It sits behind a solid caseback engraved with the Galeazzi logo. Squale includes two straps: a sand-colored fabric strap, and a textured blue rubber strap.

The Squale Galeazzi Artiglio is limited to 500 pieces, available now, priced at €1,890. See more photos here and the watch on the Squale website. Btw, do check out that website, because it's extremely cool.

5/ Hublot And Jeff Koons Blow Up The Classic Fusion Into A Balloon Dog

At a lunch during Frieze in London back in 2019, I heard someone describe Daniel Arsham as "Jeff Koons for hypebeasts." That stuck with me and it's a good thing it did, as it came in handy a couple of years ago when Hublot teamed up with Arsham. It was a good way to describe who Arsham is and why the collaboration was a perfect match. But who, then, is Jeff Koons. He is a former commodities broker who runs a studio of assistants to fabricate his ideas, and his work has always been about money, luxury and the pull of shiny things. One of his Balloon Dogs sold for $58.4 million in 2013.The good thing about Koons, however, is that he never pretended there was anything more to him. It was all about the emptiness and the mirror polish reflecting the buyer back at themselves. So it only makes sense that Hublot will move from Arsham straight to the source and they have teamed up with Koons for four new watches. And to no surprise to anyone who reads my stuff, I like them. At least the balloon dog ones.

The balloon dog inspired ones are based on the Classic Fusion, which can expertly be deduced from its name: the Classic Fusion Balloon Dog. It measures 42mm wide and 11mm thick, with 50 meters of water resistance, but the watches only resemble the case of the Classic Fusion. Instead, Hublot rebuilt the whole case to look like it's a balloon under pressure from inside. The sapphire crystal is domed, the case and bezel are puffed up, and even the H-shaped titanium screws got rounded heads. The crown is shaped like a balloon's inflation valve, and a flexible rubber tail sticks out of the case at 10:30. That rubber tail is really something... Interestingly, they also switch up the materials of the watch to get the most vivid possible colors. The silver version is made out of highly polished steel, while the red and blue use polished anodized aluminum.

The dial is polished and bulging in the case color, with domed applied indices filled with raised white Super-LumiNova and hands with raised lume inserts. The indices push against the dial almost as if the dial was an actual balloon. The Hublot logo is at 12, Koons' logo is at 3 and the counterweight of the seconds hand is a tiny balloon dog. At 3 o'clock is a date aperture with a black date disc inside.

Inside is the Hublot calibre HUB1710, which is actually a Zenith Elite 670, beating at 4Hz with 50 hours of power reserve. The plates and bridges are done in anthracite ruthenium, and Hublot reshaped the rhodium-plated rotor to look inflated too, which is commitment. The watch comes on an integrated rubber strap with a debossed metallic leather or polymer insert, closed by an equally puffy steel deployant.

While I really do like the Classic Fusion Balloon Dog, what I'm not exactly certain of is the new MP-14 Origin, also done with Koons. It's made out of titanium and sapphire, octagonally shaped, measures 44mm wide, 20mm thick, and uses red and grey steel cubes telling the time on rotating rings set with 202 baguette diamonds and blue sapphires, powered by Hublot's first automatic central tourbillon, the calibre HUB9014 (3Hz, 60 hours). Bizarre watch.

The Hublot Classic Fusion Balloon Dog by Jeff Koons is limited to 200 pieces per color and priced at €24,600, while the MP-14 Origin is limited to 30 pieces and priced at CHF 405,000. See more images here and the watches on the Hublot website.

⚙️Watch Worthy

• A review of the DWC Terra
• Hands on with the Beaucroft Contour GMT
• A review of the Girard-Perregaux Neo Constant Escapement

⏲️End links

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