Doxa And Hodinkee Shrink The Elusive Army Into The New SUB 200T; A Black Mido Multifort 8 One Crown; Mr Jones Rages Out; Abinger Goes Dark With The New Phantom; A Carbon Franck Muller

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. I completely understand the sentiment of that Mr Jones watch. I feel that way every time I look at a watch.

In this issue

• Doxa Teams Up With Hodinkee To Shrink The Elusive Army Into The New SUB 200T

• Mido Goes Full Black With The Octagonal Multifort 8 One Crown

• Mr Jones Watches Turns Everyday Frustration Into A Watch With The Right Amount Of Rage

• Abinger Takes A Step Into The Dark Side With The New Phantom

• Franck Muller Revisits Forged Carbon With The New Vanguard Ocean Drive Slim

👂What’s new

1/

Doxa Teams Up With Hodinkee To Shrink The Elusive Army Into The New SUB 200T

The Doxa Army is one of those watches that are just an absolute legend. Built in 1969 with the Swiss Army as a dedicated mil-spec diver, it swapped the SUB 300's orange dial for a tan checkerboard layout and a black oil-dipped and then heated case, then went out to a tiny number of support personnel attached to the combat divers unit. Surviving pieces are the stuff of obsession. Doxa also remade the watch several times, and now they’re doing it again by partnering up with Hodinkee. But with a twist. This time, the Army dial goes into the smaller SUB 200T case. That’s very interesting.

The case is 39mm wide, 10.70mm thick, with a 41.50mm lug-to-lug and 18mm lugs, which shaves roughly ten percent off the old Army footprint and makes it easily wearable on pretty much any wrist out there. It's made out of raw 316L stainless steel. It would have been interesting if they went for some sort of modern experimental black coating like the oil-dipping, but maybe one day. There’s no helium escape valve on the SUB 200T, but you do get 200 meters of water resistance. True to the military original, the bezel drops Doxa's famous no-deco scale for a straight 60-minute countdown.

The dial is where things get even more interesting for me. It looks like an Army dial, but it’s not a 1/1 reproduction. In the center of the dial is a roughly textured sand colored surface, surrounded by a checkerboard track and a matching date wheel in a faded "Hodinkee Grey." The same grey is used on the bezel. This is a departure from the black of the original dial, but it does look like a nicely faded Army dial without stepping into gimmick territory. Etched numerals and the orientation triangle get Old Radium Super-LumiNova, and you get Doxa's oversized orange hands.

Inside is the Sellita SW200-1 movement in the élaboré grade, decorated by Doxa. It beats at 4Hz with a 38 hour power reserve. The watch comes on a tan rubber strap with a grey NATO in the box, and the steel folding clasp has a ratcheting wetsuit extension.

The new Doxa SUB Army 200T For Hodinkee is limited to 250 pieces, priced at $2,000. The watch is only available from Watches of Switzerland which now owns Hodinkee. See more on Hodinkee.

2/

Mido Goes Full Black With The Octagonal Multifort 8 One Crown

Is this like the third time in the past two weeks that I’m pointing out that Mido has been building one of the best-value Swiss automatics for years without much fanfare. And it’s not getting boring. The new Multifort 8 One Crown takes the octagonal case that's become a genre unto itself since a certain Gérald Genta design and drops it into all-black PVD. At CHF 920, it's playing in a crowded field, but MIDO tends to win these fights on substance.

The case is 40mm wide with a lug-to-lug of 44.86mm, so it'll wear compact on most wrists. It's stainless steel with a black PVD coating, with the eight-sided bezel satin-finished on top and polished on the flanks. On top is a sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coatings on both sides. The crown screws down, the case back screws on, and that gets you 100 meters of water resistance.

The dial is deep black with horizontal lines running across it, echoed in the strap. Applied indexes are polished steel with Super-LumiNova, and the hours and minutes hands are tri-faceted, satin-finished, and lumed. There's a date at 3 o'clock, a minute track on the flange, and a flat diamond-polished seconds hand.

Inside is the automatic Caliber 80, a version of the ETA C07.611, beating at 3Hz with a Nivachron balance spring for magnetic and thermal resistance. Power reserve is, of course, fantastic at 80 hours. You see it through the case back, decorated with Côtes de Genève and the Mido logo on the rotor. The strap is black rubber with a relief motif, with a PVD pin buckle.

The Mido Multifort 8 One Crown in black is available now, priced at CHF 920. See more on the Mido website.

3/

Mr Jones Watches Turns Everyday Frustration Into A Watch With The Right Amount Of Rage

Mr Jones Watches has a pretty clear message behind their watches, and they’ve had that since the beginning: nobody actually needs a watch to tell the time anymore, so a watch may as well do something else. Sure, all of their watches tell the time, but they bring a lot of commentary to the table as well. Their latest, called &#@%!?, sends a clear message on how slowly a bad day moves. It’s designed by Rocky Beeson, the brand's in-house printmaker and this her second design for them.

The case is stainless steel, 37mm wide with a lug-to-lug of 46mm, capped with a sapphire crystal. Water resistance is 5ATM, enough for messy hand washing and rain and not much more.

But like all Mr Jones watches, this one has the schtick on the dial. Instead of conventional hands you get two hands lettered "Slow as Fuck" and "Not as Slow," sweeping around to tell you roughly how much of your life a pointless meeting has consumed. Beeson's whole approach is summed up in her line about seeing something, hating it, and drawing it, and that is all over this dial. It's a good gag executed cleanly, which is the hard part with novelty watches.

Inside is a single-jewel quartz movement, so this is about the design rather than the mechanics, and that's the honest bargain at this price. The watch comes on an 18mm silver stainless steel strap.

&#@%!? is on sale now, limited to 300 pieces. Price is set at €245. See more on the Mr Jones website.

4/

Abinger Takes A Step Into The Dark Side With The New Phantom

Abinger is the young UK brand founded by Thomas Howison Hill, and its debut, the Nimrod, was one of the more talked-about sub-£1,000 releases of the past year: a compact GADA diver with a GMT bezel that a lot of people thought punched well above its price. The Phantom is the second act, and it takes that same case, just giving it a blacked-out DLC case and two lume-forward variants called Luna and Nox

The case carries over the Nimrod’s proportions at 38mm wide and a decent 10.8mm thick, with a 45mm lug-to-lug and 20mm lugs. It's made out of 316L steel finished in black DLC, sandblasted on the lugs and brushed on the caseback. There are sapphire crystals on top and bottom. A uni-directional 12-hour bezel tracks a second time zone on a DLC-coated steel insert, and a screw-down crown gets you 200 meters of water resistance.

Two dials are available. The Luna has a fully lumed C3 dial with black markers, numerals, and skeletonised hands; while the Nox gets a deep matte black dial with raised, moulded ceramic C3 blocks for indices and heavily coated sword hands. Both get a black rehaut with C3 second markers and discreet PHANTOM text.

Inside is the Miyota 9039, the no-date automatic they also used in the Nimrod. It beats at 4Hz, has 42 hours of power reserve, and is regulated to -10/+15 seconds a day. The watches come on a black FKM strap with a matching DLC buckle.

Worth knowing: unlike the Nimrod, the Phantom is assembled in the UK, which Abinger says lets it keep tighter control of QC and after-sales. Pre-orders open tomorrow, August 1, at £699 with UK shipping included, rising to an RRP of £725. Shipping is expected to start in March 2027. See more on the Abinger website.

5/

Franck Muller Revisits Forged Carbon With The New Vanguard Ocean Drive Slim

Franck Muller kind of has that one schtick, the tonneau case. But when you box yourself into a limitation, like the set shape of the case, it allows you to be creative in other areas. And that means that the brand has rendered the Vanguard in everything from super elegant to extremely sport. For their latest model, they’ve paired up with Hamburg’s Juwelier Becker to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the retailer with the Vanguard Ocean Drive Slim which gets a forged carbon case.

The case measures 41mm wide and comes from a single block of aerospace-grade carbon, 150 layers compressed and then machined in-house. Franck Muller adds black inserts on both flanks. There are sapphire crystals on top and bottom. Water resistance is only 30 meters, which is a true shame as this looks like a fantastic summer watch but doesn’t measure up to that image.

You get the choice of a deep black or sky blue dial, and those dials are matched to the straps for a full look. The iconic oversized applied numerals are painted by hand to match the strap color, with stitching that carries the same tone through. The base of the dial is the same forged carbon as the case, with a small seconds at 6 o'clock.

Inside is the in-house calibre FM 708-S6, an automatic beating at 3Hz, with a 42-hour power reserve. It's a compact movement at 29.9mm across and under 4mm thick, which is what lets Franck Muller call this a Slim. The strap fastens with a stainless steel folding buckle finished in black PVD.

The Vanguard Ocean Drive Slim is limited to 15 examples, priced at €15,000, available exclusively through Juwelier Becker in Hamburg. See more on the Franck Muller website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• For Eater, Bettina Makalintal reports on a refreshing trend in the restaurant industry: businesses embracing lo-fi, handwritten communications and announcements in response to the ceaseless AI slop we’re served across social media these days. From a grocery store’s hand-illustrated flyers to a burger joint’s Sharpie-scribbled menu specials, restaurants are choosing advertising with a human touch and rejecting polished AI-generated graphics.

• A line of lichen-crusted stones snakes through a Vermont meadow, half-collapsed, half-enduring, as one man bends to lift and reset what time keeps undoing. What begins as a pandemic hobby becomes something stranger: a meditation on labor, permanence, and the quiet seduction of making order from ruin. Why do we keep rebuilding what will inevitably fall?

• Frustrated that law enforcement and government officials are unable to help them, Venice property owners have called upon a private company, staffed by former gang members, to remove encampments in their neighborhood. For L.A. Material, Hayes Davenport talked to one of the company’s owners—lifelong Venice resident Bobby Luna—as well as dozens of locals, from homeowners to unhoused folks, about the company’s presence in the community. Homeowners are satisfied with Ghost Town’s service, while some unhoused people who have been forced to relocate report harassment and physical force from its employees.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

This dude WhistlinDiesel found the best use for a Tesla Cybertruck. Great to see.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk