TAG And Team Ikuzawa's Beautiful 39mm Glassbox; Timex Teams Up With Todd Snyder; Glashütte Original Dips The SeaQ In Turquoise; Sylvain Pinaud's 30-Second Tourbillon On The Origine

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. We’re starting August, which means there won’t be as many releases until Geneva Watch Days in September. So, expect a bit less coverage in the coming weeks!

In this issue

• TAG Heuer Gets Back With Team Ikuzawa With A 39mm Glassbox Chronograph

• Timex Teams Up With Todd Snyder For An Elegant Take On The Marlin Mesh

• Glashütte Original Dips The SeaQ In Turquoise For A North America-Only "Northern Tide" Pair

• Sylvain Pinaud Puts A 30-Second Tourbillon At The Center Of His Origine Architecture

👂What’s new

1/

TAG Heuer Gets Back With Team Ikuzawa With A 39mm Glassbox Chronograph

Tetsu Ikuzawa was one of the great postwar Japanese racing drivers, with a career that ran through the Japanese Grand Prix, Formula 3, Formula 2, Le Mans, and factory drives for Porsche, all under a distinctive red-and-white livery. His team, Team Ikuzawa, is now run by his daughter Mai Ikuzawa as a design and motorsport brand, and that same red-and-white has translated well into design experiments. Designs that include watch dials, like those done with TAG Heuer. Where the 2023 version used the 42mm Carrera, this one, made in collaboration with Bamford Watch Department, is built on the 39mm Glassbox Chronograph, which is the best modern Carrera the brand makes.

The 39mm steel case remains unchanged from the standard Glassbox. Finishing is brushed and polished, the crown at 3 o'clock has a red lacquered ring, and the pushers keep the vintage pump-style shape. On top is that sensational domed sapphire crystal that slopes over the internal flange with no conventional bezel. The caseback is engraved with Team Ikuzawa and Bamford marks alongside the individual number. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The dial is white with a Clou de Paris texture in the center of the dial, which I think might be the first of the Glassboxes to get this much of a texture. The applied indices from the standard Glassbox are gone, replaced by printed markings for 60 minutes climbing up that sloped flange. Red does the heavy lifting: the logos, the lacquered hour and minute hands, the central chronograph seconds, and even the date wheel, where every numeral is printed in the team's red. There’s no running seconds sub-dial, replaced by the Team Ikuzawa logo above the date at 6 o'clock, with a 30-minute counter at 3 and a 12-hour counter at 9. Interestingly, the tachymetre dial on the flange has been replaced with a detailed minute track in white on black

Inside is the automatic calibre TH20-10, TAG Heuer's in-house chronograph with a column wheel, vertical clutch, and 80-hour power reserve. It comes on the new seven-row steel bracelet, with two extra straps in the box: perforated white leather with red stitching, and a white textile strap with red stripes pulled from the racing livery. The whole thing ships in a mechanic's-toolbox package with a travel pouch and a set of Team Ikuzawa charms.

The TAG Heuer Carrera Chronograph x Team Ikuzawa is limited to 150 pieces and priced at €10,450. See more on the TAG Heuer website.

2/

Timex Teams Up With Todd Snyder For An Elegant Take On The Marlin Mesh

Timex is one of those brands that works fantastically on their own, but gets even better with a good collaboration. And working with menswear designer Todd Snyder has to be a good collab any way you look at it. For this collaboration, the two brands chose the simple, small, but very popular Marlin on the mesh bracelet, paired with some pretty dials.

The case keeps the original at 34mm wide in polished steel, with a vintage-looking domed acrylic crystal on top. This watch is about as simple as it gets, with angular lugs, simple bezel and some 30 meters of water resistance.

The dial is where the changes from the regular collection show up. You get applied metallic Roman numerals at the cardinal points, dashes between them, and a railroad minute track around the rim. Snyder's stylized "TS" sits above six o'clock. Three color options are available: sunburst silver, pink, and sky blue. These dials are interesting as they use quite pastely shares of the mentioned colors, but that’s contrasted by the shine of the sunburst finishing.

The original variant had a hand-wound movement, which gave it charm but also, if we're being honest, a reputation for being fussy. This one gets a quartz movement. Purists will grumble, but I think that’s perfect for a watch like this. The watches come on silver Milanese-style mesh bracelets.

The Timex X Todd Snyder Marlin Mesh doesn’t seem to be limited and it’s available now, priced at $199. See more on the Todd Snyder website.

3/

Glashütte Original Dips The SeaQ In Turquoise For A North America-Only "Northern Tide" Pair

When I say dive watch, the chances of you instantly thinking of Glashütte Original are slim, approaching none. And yet… if you are in the market for a luxury-adjacent dive watch, and do not want to look like a junior investment banker that just got their first bonus check, Glashütte Original just might have what you want in the SeaQ collection. Now, we’re getting a duo of watches in that collection — a regular SeaQ and a SeaQ Panorama Date that are headed for the North American market, called “Northern Tide”, with a turquoise dégradé dial.

Both cases are stainless steel and unchanged from the models we’ve seen before. The smaller SeaQ is 39.5mm wide with 200 meters of water resistance, while the Panorama Date measures 43.2mm and 300 meters of water resistance. Each gets a unidirectional bezel with a black ceramic insert, a screw-down crown, and a sapphire caseback, and both have dual certification to DIN 8306 and ISO 6425.

The two watches share the same dial base, a matte turquoise lacquer fading to black at the edges, with rhodium-plated applied numerals and indices filled with Super-LumiNova and extra luminous dots for the hours. The SeaQ has a date at 3 o'clock on a white disc with black numerals; the Panorama Date uses the brand's signature large date at 4 o'clock, here in black with white print.

The SeaQ has the manufacture calibre 39-11, automatic, with a 40-hour power reserve and the usual hours, minutes, seconds and date. The Panorama Date steps up to the in-house calibre 36-13, which drives the large date and has a considerably more useful 100-hour power reserve. Both are hand-assembled, decorated and regulated, with proper Glashütte finishing on display through the sapphire back. Each watch ships on a steel bracelet with the fine-adjustment clasp plus an additional black synthetic strap with a folding clasp.

The SeaQ "Northern Tide" is priced at $13,000 and the SeaQ Panorama Date "Northern Tide" is $15,500, each limited to 100 pieces. See more on the Glashütte Original website, the SeaQ is here and the SeaQ Panorama Date here.

4/

Sylvain Pinaud Puts A 30-Second Tourbillon At The Center Of His Origine Architecture

This is one of those watches that came out a few months ago and I missed them. Since we’re kind of in the summer slow-down era, I went digging for watches that fell through the crack. And boy, am I glad I did. Sylvain Pinaud has spent the last few years building a reputation on the Origine, a time-only watch that kind of drops jaws wherever it shows up. Now, for the follow-up, it adds a tourbillon. This is the new Sylvain Pinaud 30-Second Tourbillon and it’s pretty incredible.

The case measures 39mm wide and 11.20mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 48mm, offered in either titanium or platinum. Those are sensible dimensions for a tourbillon, which too often can grow up fat and oversized. The titanium version weighs 39 grams without a strap; the platinum one comes in at 105 grams, and I love that dichotomy allowing you to choose exactly what kind of experience you would like to have with this thing. The one thing the two materials share is the water resistance, which is 30 meters.

The dial keeps the asymmetry from the Origine, with black polished steel components structuring a hand-grained surface. Three variants of the dial are available: the titanium model pairs a silver dial with a white agate center and black hands, while the two platinum models get a black dial with an onyx center and rose gold hands, or a white dial with a white agate center and blued steel hands. On the left side is a large seconds sub-dial.

The hand-wound in-house movement beats at 3Hz with a really nice 100-hour power reserve coming from a double barrel. The 30-second tourbillon uses a titanium cage, about 20% lighter than steel. The finishing is impeccable: hand-filed bevels with sharp inner angles, a barrel bridge on the back treated as a sculptural element, wheels anglaged on both sides. It ships on various leather straps with a 20mm lug width.

Each variant is limited to 10 pieces, 30 in total. Price is set at CHF 180,000, wihtout taxes. See more on the Sylvain Pinaud 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

• When Leslie Buck was discovered dead in her home in 2002, Mystic, Connecticut went into shock. What had happened to the grade school teacher and who had wanted her to die? For journalist Brenna Ehrlich, this one was personal; Buck had been her teacher in grade one. In her latest for Rolling Stone, Ehrlich returns to Mystic to learn more about who Leslie Buck was and why she was murdered

• Linni Kral has always been preoccupied with her bowels, but as a food writer, it hasn’t usually been that end she’s focused on in her writing. Now, as the internet explodes with “scat chat,” Kral is ready to investigate whether obsessing over our bowel movements has any merit. The result is a giggle fest—though you’ll need the stomach for some serious poo talk.

• Daniel left school five years ago and still lives with his parents—pretty normal in a country where around a third of young British men haven’t moved out. What is different about Daniel is his identification as “hikikomori”—literally “pulled inward”—a form of extreme social isolation. Since leaving school, he has left his family home “maybe once a month.” Research into hikikomori is limited, though some links with social anxiety and autism have been drawn. In this piece, Eve Livingston explores what day-to-day life is actually like for the families living with this phenomenon, doggedly seeking access to a world built to avoid in‑person encounters.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

I just found my old iPods, so this is a very relevant video to me. Maybe it will be to you as well.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk