Longines Releases Spirit Zulu Time 1925; Certina Expands DS Action Diver Line; FC Brings Back The Outrageously Cool Manchette; IWC's The Big Pilot Perpetual Calendar Tourbillon Le Petit Prince

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Certina once again shows us that they might be one of the most underrated brands, certainly under the Swatch Group umbrella. Great price for a great watch.

In this issue:

• Longines Celebrates 100 Years Of Zulu Time With New Spirit Zulu Time 1925 Edition

• Certina Expands The DS Action Diver Line With A 40.5mm Version Of A Tough Watch At A Great Price

• Frederique Constant Brings Back The Outrageously Cool Manchette Cuff Watch

• IWC Releases The Big Pilot Perpetual Calendar Tourbillon Le Petit Prince In Blue Ceramic

👂What’s new

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Longines Celebrates 100 Years Of Zulu Time With New Spirit Zulu Time 1925 Edition

There’s a handful of watch brands that have as significant a heritage in pilot’s watches as Longines does. They made watches and instruments for pilots like Weems and Lindbergh, and have been doing so since the early 1900s. They even made the first wristwatch to display both local time and a second timezone on one dial, and it’s this watch, the 1925 Zulu Time, that Longines is now paying homage to, celebrating 100 years of the creation. The Zulu Time was a funky little piece with a square case and a double scale dial, with some great use of color. The new Longines Spirit Zulu Time 1925 is kind of the opposite — large, monochrome, but with a decidedly retro vibe.

Based on the regular Longines Spirit Zulu Time, the 1925 comes in a stainless steel case that measures 39mm wide and 13.25mm thick. On top is a sapphire crystal surrounded by a bidirectional rotating bezel that has a 18k rose gold capped insert with a 24-hour scale engraved into it. The edge of the bezel is knurled, as is the screw-in crown that gives you 100 meters of water resistance.

The dial gets a matte black treatment with applied hour markers and a gold minute track on the outer edge. The hours are indicated by diamond-shaped markers and applied Arabic numerals with gold surrounds and plenty of lume inside. The 6 o’clock marker is missing, as you’ll find the date aperture there. The hour and minute hands are sword shaped and gold colored, with gold GMT hand that has a large triangular tip and a black stem. The dial also has the Longines winged hourglass logo, printed “Zulu Time” and “Chronometer” script in the bottom and the always awkward five applied stars.

Inside, no changes. You still get the ETA-produced calibre L844.4 which beast at 3.5Hz and has a decent 72 hour power reserve. It’s also a flyer-style GMT, which means that you adjust the local hour hand in one-hour increments. This 1925 edition also has a gold PVD treated rotor, engraved with a partial map of the world and the prime meridian running from north to south and over Greenwich. The watch comes on a stainless steel bracelet with a folding clasp and you get an additional black NATO-style strap.

The new Longines Spirit Zulu Time 1925 doesn’t appear to be a limited edition and it’s available now. Price is set at €4,500, which is a substantial €1,000 over the regular Spirit Zulu Time, but this does give you a gold capped bezel, transparent caseback and an additional strap. See more on the Longines website.

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Certina Expands The DS Action Diver Line With A 40.5mm Version Of A Tough Watch At A Great Price

The Certina DS Action Diver line is perhaps one of the most underrated dive watches you can buy. It’s classically styled, incredibly well built, with some serious tech packed into it and always sold at pretty great prices. Now, Certina is releasing a new DS Action Diver in 40.5mm with some serious updates to the Double Security system (from the DS in the name) which the brand has been using since 1959 as waterproofing tech. This watch gets the “New DS Concept Extreme Shock Resistance” which not only takes care of waterproofing but now also gives you a shock resistance greater than 10,000 Gs. How greater? We won’t exactly know, because Certina claims that the watch has broken the testing machine, which had a maximum impact capacity of 10,000 Gs.

The DS Action Diver comes in a couple of sizes, more specifically 43mm and 38mm. This new collection cuts that in half, measuring 40.5mm wide and 14.1mm thick. Interestingly, you also get a choice of material — either stainless steel or titanium — both of which have a brushed and polished finish, topped by a sapphire crystal that’s surrounded by a unidirectional rotating steel or titanium bezel with ceramic insert that matches the dial color. Water resistance is 300 meters and the watch is ISO 6425 compliant.

Three dials are available: a black, white and blue. However, the blue is only available on the titanium model. The blue and white have steel markers and hands, while the black has gilt outlined hands and markers. All the hands and markers are filled with Super-LumiNova and there’s a date aperture at 3 o’clock.

Inside, no surprises, as Certina is part of the Swatch Group. You get the ETA Powermatic 80.611 automatic, which is the ubiquitous automatic used by the entire group, best known for its 80 hour power reserve. The watch can be had on either a steel three-link bracelet with a folding clasp, a titanium bracelet or a black NATO strap with a beige stripe.

And while the new Certina DS Action Diver 40.5 has some pretty good specs, the most attractive part about it must be the price. It starts at CHF 785 for the steel version on NATO, jumping up to CHF 835 for the steel versions on steel bracelets, all the way to CHF 895 for the titanium version on titanium bracelet, all of which are pretty fairly priced watches. See more on the Certina website.

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Frederique Constant Brings Back The Outrageously Cool Manchette Cuff Watch

So far, I have mostly praised Frederique Constant for producing beautiful watches with in house movements — often highly complicated — at always pretty unbeatable prices. Most of these watches are pretty traditional pieces, and there’s nothing wrong with it. But what does happen when they release something a bit out there, it’s usually something really wild. The latest such release is the return of the Manchette, a watch they made 20 years ago. And while cuff watches are not unusual, this one is quite special, with a case and bracelet that share the same Clous de Paris pattern making it quite a statement piece with strong eighties vibes and four different versions.

The case is made out of stainless steel, fully polished and a very pronounced 3D effect due to the deep pyramids that make up the Clous de Paris pattern. Technically, the case measures 20mm wide, 6.45mm thick and has a length of 25.7mm. However, that length is pretty much completely irrelevant as the case flows seamlessly into the bracelet, making it one uninterrupted band around your wrist. Very cool. The crystal is sapphire, the crown is heavily recessed to make it completely disappear and water resistance is 30 meters.

But as wild as the case/bracelet combo is, FC has four dials that are just as exciting. The most subdued of the four is the matte silver dial with Roman numerals. Working up from that, we have the black onyx dial, the green malachite dial and the really sparkly dial set with 158 diamonds. There’s not much more to the dials, other than the two stick hands and the FC logo at 12 o’clock.

Frederique Constant is very well known for making their in-house mechanical movements, but good luck fitting an automatic in here. So, these four watches come with the quartz FC-200 calibre that has a 60 month battery life. You already know that the watches come on the Clous de Paris band, which is actually made out of seven flexible, flowing links, for size adjustment, and closed with a hidden deployment clasp.

The new Frederique Constant Classics Manchette collection is available now and while FC markets it towards women, I can totally see this worn by men making a statement. Price ranges from a quite reasonable CHF 1,295 for the silver dial version, through CHF 1,895 for the onyx and malachite dials, all the way up to CHF 4,295 for the diamond dial version. See more on the Frederique Constant website.

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IWC Releases The Big Pilot Perpetual Calendar Tourbillon Le Petit Prince In Blue Ceramic

It’s incredibly easy to be cynical. To swat away new things and poke fun of things you find ridiculous. So many times I’ve done that, especially when I see collaborations in the watch world. They are often over the top and forced money extraction vessels with very little effort. They can be corny. And it would be easy to put the IWC collaboration with the Antoine de Saint-Exupery estate into that basket. But, dammit, the IWC x Le Petit Prince watches manage to melt even my icy heart. Sure, this new release, the Big Pilot Perpetual Calendar Tourbillon Le Petit Prince is completely impractical, huge and wildly expensive. But you have to love it.

While we’ve seen steel and gold versions of the Big Pilot Le Petit Prince versions, this new release gets a much more advanced material — ceramic. And we know that IWC is great at colored ceramics, so this one comes in a really nice shade of blue. And it lives up to the Big Pilot name, since it measures 46.5mm wide, 16.18mm thick and has a massive 55mm lug-to-lug. The blue of the case is perfectly contrasted with the 5N gold oversized diamond-shaped crown and the caseback made out of the same gold. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The blue of the case continues onto the dial which has the same shade and a sunray brushing. You get modern rounded applied numerals, lumed markers on the minute track and the signature Big Pilot hands done in yellow 5N gold and a lot of lume in them. You get a flying tourbillon aperture at 12, along with three sub-dials for the Perpetual Calendar functions — at 3 you have a date and power reserve dial, at 6 you have the month and moonphase dial (with the Petit Prince on his asteroid) and at 9 o’clock you’ll find the day indicator. Somewhat awkwardly, there’s a digital year display just below the 8 o’clock marker.

Inside, you’ll find the truly impressive in-house calibre 51950. It’s wound by a Petit Prince-themed solid gold rotor, beats at 19,800vph, is regulated by a flying one-minute tourbillon and has a pretty wild 168 hour power reserve. That’s 7 days. The perpetual calendar module, interestingly, is a direct descendant of the module that Kurt Klaus designed for IWC in the 1980s. The moonphase will deviate by one day after 577.5 years. The watch comes on a case-matching blue rubber strap, closed by a gold folding clasp.

The new IWC Big Pilot’s Watch Perpetual Calendar Tourbillon Le Petit Prince is limited to 100 pieces, priced at €118,000. See more on the IWC website.

⏲️Wait a minute

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

• Joseph Clements fell in love with LSD as a teenager. Later, as Akasha Song, he fell in love with DMT even harder, learning how to extract it from jurema bark so that he could share it with his fellow psychonauts. People gonna people, though, so sharing became selling, and selling became selling at scale, and selling at scale became a multimillion-dollar empire that made Scarface seem penny-ante. Andy Greenberg, as he so often does, lays out his reporting impeccably, turning Akasha’s candor into a jaw-dropping tale of unsustainable escalation.

• Most of today’s screenwriters continue to stick to the tried-and-true cinematic formula of “the inciting incident, the climax, the resolution”. In this Aeon essay, Eliane Glaser pushes back against this repetitive structure. Glaser then asks: “So, what happens when we truly break with convention?” What kinds of stories can we tell when filmmakers deviate from three acts.

• The emissions from individual AI text, image, and video queries seem small—until you add up what the industry isn’t tracking and consider where it’s heading next. AI might be a bigger problem for the environment than anyone expects.

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Yo! This looks fantastic! Darren Aronofsky is back in style, after a bit of a lull. Also, shoutout for putting Kim’s Video into the movie, despite that storefront most certainly not being the Kim’s Video store.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk