TAG Heuer Monaco Speed 12 Has A Cool Radial Jump Hour; Raymond Weil's Integrated-Bracelet Watch; Glashütte Original Seventies Chronograph Gets A Reverse Panda; Piaget Teams Up With Wristcheck

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Take a good look at that Raymond Weil… Does that remind you of something? I know it reminded me very much of it when I got a chance to try it on in Geneva.

In this issue

• TAG Heuer Monaco Speed 12 Uses Louis Vuitton's Display For An Extremely Cool Radial Jump Hour

• Raymond Weil Enters the Integrated-Bracelet Category for the First Time With the New A.R.T. Date 38mm

• Glashütte Original Seventies Chronograph XV Brings the Reverse Panda To A Cult German Watch

• Piaget Teams Up With Wristcheck For A Very Handsome Blue Altiplano Ultimate Automatic 910P

👂What’s new

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TAG Heuer Monaco Speed 12 Uses Louis Vuitton's Display For An Extremely Cool Radial Jump Hour

The Monaco has always had an identity that runs on tension: a square, water-resistant chronograph that became famous for being worn by a racing driver in a film, then spent decades trying to live up to both the watch and the myth simultaneously. TAG Heuer's recent Monaco releases have been truly interesting: the Split Seconds, the Evergraph, and last year's in-house calibre TH20-11 version showed a brand willing to push the model technically rather than just aesthetically. The Speed 12 continues that trajectory and then does something else entirely, pulling in La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton and their patented Spin Time jumping hour display to build what has to be a first — an automaton of a 12 cylinder radial engine that stands in for the jump hour display.

The case is 40mm wide Grade 5 titanium with alternating brushed and polished surfaces, a sapphire bezel, a domed sapphire crystal, and a sapphire caseback. Four black DLC-coated openworked arches at the corners hold the suspended movement in place. The crown sits at 3 o'clock with the TAG Heuer shield. Water resistance is 30 meters.

The dial is entirely open and built around 12 rotating titanium pistons arranged in a ring, each engraved with a black-lacquered Arabic numeral. As the minute hand completes one revolution, the active piston returns to its parked position while the next rotates 90 degrees to display the current hour. The central surface has a vertically grooved texture looking like an engine cover, and the skeletonized minutes hand has a red tip. The black opaline display ring around the perimeter uses white markings with red accents at five-minute intervals. The whole thing is a piece of kinematic theater.

The automatic calibre TH84-00 was developed and manufactured by La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton, reworking the Spin Time concept originally created by Michel Navas and Enrico Barbasini. It runs at 28,800 vibrations per hour with a 45-hour power reserve. The strap is black rubber with a textile-style embossing, red stitching, and a titanium folding clasp with double safety push-buttons.

Limited to 50 individually numbered pieces, the TAG Heuer Monaco Speed 12 is available from December 2026. Pricing is set at €77,000. See more on the TAG Heuer website.

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Raymond Weil Enters the Integrated-Bracelet Category for the First Time With the New A.R.T. Date 38mm

Raymond Weil has spent nearly five decades as one of Geneva's most consistent family-owned watchmakers, building a reputation on accessible Swiss watches and, more recently, some quite interesting vintage-inspired releases. What they've never done is make an integrated-bracelet sports watch. Kind of unusual, considering the waves the genre trend has hit the market. The A.R.T. Date 38mm changes that, and if the acronym — Art, Refinement and Timekeeping — sounds a little forced, you’ll forget about it the moment you see the watch. Even though it looks very familiar to one of the other major integrated sports watches on the market.

The case measures 38mm wide and 9.95mm thick, which puts this firmly in the versatile daily-wearer camp rather than the aggressive sports-watch territory. The construction leans on flowing transitions between surfaces rather than the angular geometry that dominates this category, with satin-brushed surfaces carrying most of the visual work and polished bevels providing contrast. The signed fluted crown sits at 3 o'clock, the caseback is solid, and water resistance is 100 meters.

The dial is available in graphite, metallic blue, or sage grey, all with the same multi-level construction: a sunray-brushed center, a recessed groove separating it from an outer azuré-textured minutes track. Applied faceted indices, a double marker at 12 o'clock, and green Super-LumiNova give it a contemporary feel without being loud about it. A date window at 3 o'clock sits at 3 o’clock.

Inside is a Sellita SW200-1, the reliable workhorse that powers much of the Swiss industry at this price level. It runs at 28,800 vibrations per hour and delivers 41 hours of power reserve. It comes on an integrated bracelet constructed with H-shaped links, polished bevels, and subtly chamfered intermediate links, it tapers from the case down to a folding clasp and does what a good integrated bracelet should: make the watch look like a single object rather.

The stainless-steel-only models start at €1,995; two bi-colour references combining steel with rose-gold-coloured accents on the bezel, crown, and intermediate bracelet links add a slightly dressier option for €2,095. See more on the Raymond Weil website.

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Glashütte Original Seventies Chronograph XV Brings the Reverse Panda To A Cult German Watch

Glashütte Original keeps finding new reasons to release the Seventies Chronograph. When I covered the Swimming Pool and Watermelon in August 2024, the schtick was audacity through color. The XV Limited Edition goes the exact opposite way — the same TV-shaped case and integrated bracelet work just as well when stripped back to a black-and-silver reverse panda. They're right. And this one's for Germany, Austria and Switzerland only, the mirror image of the panda-dial Seventies X they made for the American market.

The case here is unchanged from every other Seventies Chronograph Panorama Date you've seen: 40×40mm brushed and polished stainless steel with integrated lugs, a 46.4mm lug-to-lug, and 14mm of thickness. The square pushers sit on either side of the crown and the case wears more compact on the wrist than the dimensions suggest. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The dial has a matte black lacquer base, with silver galvanised subdials. White gold hands and applied hour markers fill with Super-LumiNova. The display is everything the Seventies is known for: central hours, minutes, running seconds subdial, power reserve indicator, the signature panorama date with two non-overlapping discs, central chronograph seconds, a 30-minute counter, and an arched 12-hour totaliser window.

Inside is the in-house calibre 37-02, a column-wheel automatic flyback chronograph with Glashütte stripes, a skeletonised double-G rotor with polished bevels, a silicon hairspring, and 70 hours of power reserve. The watch comes on an integrated steel bracelet with a fine-adjustment clasp.

The Glashütte Original Seventies Chronograph XV Limited Edition is limited to 100 pieces and available exclusively through Glashütte Original boutiques and retailers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Price is set at €17,100. See more on the Glashütte Original website.

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Piaget Teams Up With Wristcheck For A Very Handsome Blue Altiplano Ultimate Automatic 910P

Piaget rarely does limited editions. When they do, it's always something really nice. The brand has spent almost 70 years building a reputation around ultra-thin movements, starting with the 9P in 1957 and the self-winding 12P in 1960, and the Altiplano Ultimate Automatic 910P is the current extreme end of that lineage — a 41mm watch in 18K white gold that measures just 4.3mm thin, made possible because the movement is not housed inside the case; it is the case. 30 of these now exist in a Wristcheck edition, painted in the Hong Kong platform's signature blue.

The case is 18K white gold, 41mm wide and 4.3mm thick, with an anti-reflective sapphire crystal. Given how the 910P is constructed, with movement components integrated into the case middle, there is no display caseback. Instead, a solid back engraved with both the Piaget Coat of Arms and the Wristcheck logo. Water resistance is 20 meters, but this watch does not like water in any meaningful quantity. And you should treat it accordingly.

The dial is Wristcheck blue lacquer with a sunburst finish, and Piaget has carried the blue through the screws, the hour hand, and the peripheral rotor. That rotor is worth describing: rather than a central oscillating weight, the 910P uses a bi-color peripheral rotor in pink gold with blue CVD and grey PVD coating that spins around the outer edge of the movement.

Powering all of this is the Piaget manufacture 910P, an ultra-thin automatic with 238 components, a 50-hour power reserve, and hours and minutes only. The movement won the Mechanical Exception Prize at the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève in 2021. The strap is deep blue calfskin with Wristcheck blue topstitching and an 18K white gold ardillon buckle.

The Piaget x Wristcheck Altiplano Ultimate Automatic 910P (ref. G0A51127) is limited to 30 pieces and price is set at $46,300 before taxes. See more on the Wristcheck 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 their parents ripped two young sisters from their privileged lives, gave them fake names, and took them on the lam, they thought it was because their father was in trouble with the IRS. It would be years before they learned the truth about his life of crime.

• Frank, Lincoln, and Paul met over a chess board more than a decade ago. They didn’t share much in the way of circumstances, just a love of the game. After one of them disappeared, though, another of them checked in—and set in motion a chain of events that brought them closer together than any of them might have thought possible. John Leland has long specialized in telling the stories of everyday New Yorkers, and once again manages to make a city of eight million feel as tight-knit as a small town.

• How did a college football town in Georgia spawn the B-52s, R.E.M., and Widespread Panic, to name just a few of the bands who’ve called Athens both home and inspiration? The maestros and misfits who led Athens’ rise to one of the world’s most influential and improbable music towns tell all in this oral history.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

I’m supremely jealous of how good these videos are. If only did something similar for watches…

Thanks for reading,
Vuk