The Serica 1174 Parade: Minimalism, Revival, and the New Shape of Watch Authenticity

On a crisp Saturday morning at a Paris café, sunlight dances across marble tabletops and green Parisian chairs, painting angular highlights on silver cutlery and fine ceramic mugs. Amid the café’s mix of locals and visitors, a slender wrist emerges from the sleeve of a sand-colored linen blazer — just as a barista sets down a flat white with a practiced flourish. What catches the eye, momentarily pulling it from the bustle and hum, is not a screen or an oversized brand’s logo, but a subtle glint — the Serica 1174 Parade.

The watch itself doesn’t beg attention. Its elliptical, stadium-shaped case feels architectural, echoes of brutalist curves softened into something unexpectedly inviting. There’s no loud logo, no ticking seconds hand to urge one onward — just two elegant, polished leaf-shaped hands that point out the time with restraint. This scene is not pure fantasy; it is precisely the kind of encounter the Serica 1174 Parade was built to create. But how did we get to this moment, and why does this object — partly ancient, partly futuristic, wholly contemporary — carry such meaning? The answer is a journey through minimalism, retro revivalism, and the tangled search for authenticity in a distracted age.

Minimalism, in both art and lifestyle, is less a style than a philosophy — a cultivated response to excess and clutter, born of twentieth-century anxieties and post-war optimism. The roots reach deep: from Kasimir Malevich’s 1915 Black Square — an audacious experiment in elimination — to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s crisp assertion, “less is more,” minimalism reimagines beauty as clarity, paring away until only the necessary remains.

In the visual arts of the 1950s and 60s, pioneers like Donald Judd and Frank Stella rejected noisy abstraction for what Judd called “the thing as a whole, its quality whole, is what is interesting.” Stella, too, distilled his practice to the razor-edged maxim: “What you see is what you see”. Agnes Martin, chasing the infinite within the line, claimed, “Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye, it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection”. Such artistic asceticism found parallels in architecture (van der Rohe’s glass-and-steel rectangles), design, and ultimately, the modern obsession with curating our material lives.

This ethic has migrated, in recent years, from gallery and boutique into the daily rituals of global consumers weary of too-muchness. Marie Kondo’s KonMari method — “keep only those things that speak to your heart” — brings the sensibility of the white cube into the Chaotic Closet, an answer to what Kyle Chayka calls “addiction to accumulation”. Minimalism today is both response to and symptom of a world drowning in options; it is a rejection of “the passion to possess,” as Joshua Becker put it; an assertion that “focus on what’s important” creates “freedom, fulfillment, and happiness”.

This influence on watch design is profound. Watches, once sites of mechanical bravura and at time maximalist ornament, are increasingly canvases for minimalist simplicity. The Serica Parade, with its interestingnshape, unobtrusive dial, and the almost defiant absence of a seconds hand, epitomizes this philosophy — what one reviewer called “a gentler hour, freed from the constant reminder of time passing and never stopping”.

But minimalism is only half the modern mood. If some crave less, many are drawn to the comforts of before. Retro revival culture, now a driving force in fashion, music, and design, is not simply a longing for kitsch. It is a profound, commercially potent nostalgia. In this era, the past becomes not just a reference but a product — what analysts term “emotional currency”. Why? Because as digital everything remixes and accelerates, the known and vetted feels like psychic shelter.

The Netflix hit Stranger Things was not just entertainment; it drove an “80s-era phenomenon” so strong that lumberjack shirts and vintage jackets exploded in popularity. “Nostalgia marketing has become a billion-dollar industry,” one researcher observed, “because nostalgic feelings increase consumers’ willingness to spend”. Pokémon Go’s 2016 sensation was more than gameplay — it was time-travel to childhood for millions. As marketing analysts noted, “Recognizing that nostalgia is the way to any millennial’s heart, the company is taking full advantage”.

Yet this is not mere whimsy. Retro revival is aesthetic conservatism in disguise; it is, in the words of one observer, “restraint is the new rebellion.” Vintage fashion and décor signal both sustainability concerns and a quest for individuality in an age of mass replicability: “In a world dominated by fast fashion and fleeting digital content, vintage offers a sense of permanence and authenticity”. It is a search for depth in pattern, silhouette, and the patina of time.

The Serica 1174 Parade is where these currents — minimalism and revivalism — meet in rare harmony. Born of a French microbrand founded by Jérôme Burgert and Gabriel Vachette in 2019, Serica’s mission is to produce “singular and sophisticated waterproof Swiss chronometers,” making the brand a case-study in contemporary independent watchmaking. The Parade is their first comprehensive dress watch: designed not for display but for living — in vivid, daily, Parisian moments like the café scene with which we began.

The Parade’s most notable feature is its 35mm × 41mm stadium-shaped case, an “elongated ellipse with straight vertical sides”, not something you see every day. The reference number — 1174 — expresses its proportions (1:1.74), an architectural in-joke and a mark of design innovation. Crafted from 316L stainless steel, alternating brushed and polished finishes, its slim (8.3-8.6mm thick) profile grants it both presence and comfort.

But this elegance is undergirded by technical sophistication: the “sandwich” case construction, with caseback screws anchoring through to the bezel, allows for an impressive 100 meters of water resistance — without a screw-down crown. This technical feat is matched by thoughtful symmetry, with crown guards mirrored by a subtle 9 o’clock protrusion for profile balance.

The Parade’s dial distills modern minimalism — sunburst finishes, a 48 S-curve guilloché pattern for dynamic shimmer, and twelve half-sphere appliques for hour markers. “Every glance at the time offers a rediscovery of the watch,” the brand proclaims. There are no loud colors, no logo at 12 — indeed, branding is so subtle that only a minute “Swiss Made” inscription at 6 remains. Available in “satin black” (true dress) and “sunray brass/bronze” (echoes of vintage gold), the dials recall the prestige of 1970s classics.

The parade’s hands — the only kinetic aspect, and even then, only hours and minutes — are mirror-polished, domed, and “sword-leaf” shaped. Their simplicity frames a radical decision: to forgo the seconds hand altogether. This is, materially and philosophically, a rejection of hurry. “Life should always be a matter of elegance before worrying about fractions of a second,” the founders argue.

Inside, the Swiss SoProd M100 automatic movement (25-jewel, 28,800 vibrations/hr, 42-hour power reserve) echoes the minimalist ethos: robust, efficient, with Côtes de Genève finishing. With no running seconds hand (and thus no chronometer certification), the movement is nevertheless as precise as its tool-watch siblings, tested for accuracy in six positions to assure tolerances within -4/+6 seconds/day.

Completing the package is a black calfskin strap, tapering gently for comfort and style, and a signature buckle that mimics the case’s stadium shape — a poetic echo of the design's anchoring idea.

The Parade is neither pure minimalist icon nor vintage pastiche, but a masterful fusion of influence and intent.

At its core, the the watch is a triumph of minimalism — a “thing as a whole” that privileges substance and silhouette over adornment. The absence of branding, dial flourishes, and temporal anxiety transforms wearing the watch into a “refined approach to timekeeping,” one that invites its owner to be rather than to measure each passing instant.

Yet it is not minimalist in the ascetic, sterile sense. The sunray guilloché on the dial, the gentle glow of half-sphere markers, and the elliptical warmth of the case all signal a love for detail — echoing Agnes Martin’s insistence that “beauty…is in the mind”. The Parade is less about reduction for its own sake, and more about illuminating essentials with craft and care.

At the same time, the Parade’s design speaks powerfully to retro revivalism. Its proportions recall the reign of shaped watches — Patek Philippe’s Golden Ellipse, Omega’s DeVille, even the softer lines of the Seventies. The gentle curve of the stadium case and the restrained colorways evoke “a more sporty and industrial expression” of these precedents. But where so much retro is surface imitation, Serica translates nostalgia into something authentic. The watch is “not a limited edition” but a permanent collection, an object for actual, daily use.

Most compellingly, the Parade is unafraid to tackle the contradictions of contemporary taste. It is “robust” and “water-resistant” — attributes of tool watches, not fragile dress timepieces. It nods to the current “shaped watch renaissance” among collectors fatigued by round, generic offerings. As Russell Sheldrake at Time + Tide summarized, it’s “the perfect dress watch for someone more used to wearing chunky sports watches every day”. In combining the “absence of logos or text,” geometric innovation born of the past, and technical demands of modern consumers, the Parade captures the intersection of “meaningful simplicity and understated luxury”.

Retro revival, for its part, teeters between comfort and cliché. When every season retreads old patterns, authenticity is threatened by endless remix. As some reviewers of Stranger Things pointed out, the show “operates on pure aesthetic nostalgia — no thoughts, just vibes”. Is there truly meaning in the past, or only the anesthetic of déjà vu? The Parade responds to these critiques with humility and intent. By eschewing signature marks of status, harnessing historical forms without slavish mimicry, and delivering technical integrity as standard, it resists easy classification as either hollow trend or empty lifestyle product.

As our imagined Parisian morning winds on, the wearer's wrist returns quietly to their lap. There is no need for attention, yet the Parade's gentle surface catches afternoon light. In a world obsessed with quantity — photos, notifications, possessions — it is restrained objects like this that paradoxically offer the richest experience.

Read more about the Serica 1174 here.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk