Timex and J.Crew Put A Brook Trout On The MK1; Unimatic's Quartz Titanium Modello Quattro; Louis Erard Adds Colors To 2340; Bangalore Watch Co.'s Carbon Dial Peninsula; Czapek's Goutte de Rosée

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Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Is preppy style still a thing? Even if it’s not, I’m very much digging the trout on the dial.

In this issue

• Timex and J.Crew Team Up to Put a Brook Trout on the Dial Of A New MK1

• Unimatic Releases Titanium Modello Quattro Ultratool in Time-Only And GMT Configurations

• Louis Erard Adds Mauve And Forest Dial Options To The 2340 Collection

• Bangalore Watch Company Adds a Carbon Dial Built From Industrial Waste to the Peninsula Collection

• Czapek Releases The Promenade Goutte de Rosée, A 25-Piece Grand Feu Enamel Edition In 18k Yellow Gold

👂What’s new

1/

Timex and J.Crew Team Up to Put a Brook Trout on the Dial Of A New MK1

Timex and J.Crew have been circling each other for years in the way that very American brands tend to — both nostalgic, both aspirational in a blue-collar-prep kind of way, both good at what they do. They’ve teamed up several times over the years, but this new MK1 that’s coming out is just sensational.

The case is 36mm wide, gold-plated stainless steel, with an 18mm lug width. On top is an acrylic crystal, which gives it a bit of a nostalgic feel. Water resistance is rated to 50 meters. That doesn’t exactly make it swim-proof, but I’m sure it would survive an accidental fall off the dock into the water, or whatever else happens in the preppy worlds.

The dial is white, and it has three things on it: the Timex logo, twelve Arabic numerals with a rail track, and a brook trout. The fish is rendered from an original watercolor by J.Crew's in-house artist, and it occupies a generous portion of the dial. It's a matter-of-fact detail that’s just fun. A trout is on the dial because this is a watch for summer and summer means fishing, or at least the idea of fishing. The J.Crew logo sits on the caseback.

The movement is quartz, calibre unspecified. But who cares when you have a brook trout on the dial? The strap is a braided dark brown leather, which will certainly match the one holding your khaki shorts up.

The Timex MK1 for J.Crew launches tomorrow, May 28th, priced at $198. From what I gather, the watch isn’t on either Timex’s or J.Crew’s website yet, but keep an eye out for it here when they go on sale.

2/

Unimatic Releases Titanium Modello Quattro Ultratool in Time-Only And GMT Configurations

I’ve been wanting to see more interesting quartz watches from microbrands and I think this has been happening over the past year or two. And I’m digging what the Italian brand Unimatic is doing with quartz watches. Their latest example of that comes in the form of the new Modello Quattro Ultratool.

The case measures 40mm wide and 12mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 49mm. Grade 2 titanium brings the complete package down to 65 grams. The wide fixed bezel is sandblasted, the crown screws down, and water resistance is rated to 300 meters. There's a sapphire crystal on top and a titanium caseback. Straightforward, uncluttered, exactly what you'd expect from Unimatic.

The dial is black and built for legibility. Large numerical markers are rendered in Unimatic's proprietary Custom Variable Font, developed specifically to be read easily. Hands and indices are coated in green-emission Super-LumiNova. The GMT adds a 24-hour disc read through an aperture just below 12 o'clock, with an orange triangular indicator pointing to the second time zone. A disc display rather than a traditional fourth hand is a great way to show it. The GMT also gets a frameless date display at six o'clock, with the date disc color-matched to the rest of the dial.

The time-only reference runs a Seiko VH31A quartz movement; the GMT uses a Ronda 515.24D. Both come with on black nylon, two-piece straps secured with a sandblasted pin buckle, with an orange inner layer that runs along the edges.

The Unimatic Modello Quattro Ultratool is available now, and both versions are limited to 99 pieces. The price is set at €610 for the time-only UT4-U-TI and €730 for the GMT UT4-U-TI-GMT. See more on the Unimatic website here and here.

3/

Louis Erard Adds Mauve And Forest Dial Options To The 2340 Collection

Louis Erard launched the 2340 last year as a real left turn for the brand — a cushion-case integrated sports watch named after the postal code of Le Noirmont, a long way from the regulator watches and artistic collabs that made them interesting. Sure, it was another integrated bracelet metal sports watch, but they did something interesting with the different patterns on the dials. Now the collection gets two new dial options: Mauve and Forest.

The case hasn't changed. At 40mm wide and just 8.95mm thick, with a satin-finished titanium middle and polished steel bezel, lugs, crown, and caseback, it remains one of the slimmer integrated sports watches around. Especially in this price point. The polished gadroon details running along the flanks flow into the first bracelet links, softening what can sometimes be an abrupt transition on watches like this. There’s a sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating on top, a solid caseback, 50 meters of water resistance.

The Mauve gets a soft purple lacquered surface with a stamped oblong pill texture, which references the polished centre links of the bracelet. The Forest uses a deep green lacquered dial with horizontal stamped lines, giving it a crisper, more graphic character than the Mauve. Both keep the white transferred minute track with Louis Erard lettering, the applied satin-finished LE logo plaque at 3 o'clock, and rhodium-plated diamond-cut indices filled with blue-emitting Super-LumiNova. The rhodium-plated hands, satin-brushed with polished bevels, get the same SLN-C1 treatment.

Inside is the Sellita SW300-1 automatic in élaboré grade. It runs at 28,800vph with a 56-hour power reserve. The 92-piece integrated bracelet tapers from 28mm at the case to 20mm at the wrist, combining satin-finished titanium outer links with polished steel centres, closing with a concealed butterfly clasp.

The Louis Erard 2340 Mauve and 2340 Forest are permanent collection additions, both priced at CHF 3,250 before taxes. See more on the Louis Erard website.

4/

Bangalore Watch Company Adds a Carbon Dial Built From Industrial Waste to the Peninsula Collection

The Bangalore Watch Company is, surprisingly, one of the rare micro brands coming out of India and they’ve built their catalogue on aviation, space, cricket, and the Indian navy. I love what they are doing and last year the brand introduced the Peninsula Professional, a bezel-less pebble-shaped sports watch drawing on India's mountains and coastlines. The Peninsula Carbon keeps that case and pivots the concept toward the urban landscape, specifically toward what cities put into the air.

The case is the same smooth, lug-less 316L steel shell from the Peninsula Professional, 44mm wide and 13.75mm thick, but thanks to the fully round case and lack of lugs it wears much smaller than you would think. On top sits a double-domed sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating on both sides. The crown screws down and has the BWC logo. Water resistance is rated to 200 meters.

The dial is the novelty. Bangalore Watch Company worked with Bangalore-based materials company Carbon Craft to develop what they call ReforgeCarbon, a composite that combines forged carbon fibre with recovered carbon black, a substance extracted through the pyrolysis of industrial waste that would otherwise be vented as pollution. Each dial carries a chaotic marbled pattern, so no two are identical. The hour markers and hands are filled with BGW9 Grade-A Super-LumiNova and rhodium coated. The minutes track doubles as a mock Air Quality Index scale, graduating from green to deep red around the perimeter. A tone-on-tone date window sits at six o'clock.

Inside is the Sellita SW200-1 automatic running at 28,800vph with roughly 41 hours of power reserve. It does the job. The watch comes on a black high-density fluoro-elastomer rubber strap with a pin buckle.

The Peninsula Carbon is limited to 100 pieces, priced at around €2,540 or INR 283,000. See more on the Bangalore Watch Company website.

5/

Czapek Releases The Promenade Goutte de Rosée, A 25-Piece Grand Feu Enamel Edition In 18k Yellow Gold

The original Goutte d'Eau, with its blue Grand Feu enamel dial produced by Donzé Cadrans, built around a ripple pattern that radiated outward from the small seconds at 4:30, has always been the perfect version of the Czapek Promenade. Not to say that the other models were not nice, but that one was very special. Now, we’re getting a new drop-themed version of the Promenade. The new Goutte de Rosée, meaning dewdrop, comes in a 18k yellow gold case with a beautiful rippled green dial.

The case is 38mm wide and 10.8mm thick, fully polished with sandblasted recessed flanks on the sides. The Promenade case always had a dressy formality to it, and moving from steel to 18k gold makes it look even more dress-like. On top is a double-domed sapphire crystal and water resistance is 50 meters.

The dial is produced by Donzé Cadrans once again. A silver base plate is struck with a stamping die that has a 3D wave motif machined into it, pressing concentric ripples into the metal. Then comes the green enamel application, which varies from 0.5mm thick in the recesses to 0.2mm at the crests and this variation creates the shifting color and the impression of depthGetting it right requires eight firings at 800°C, and it's why the rejection rate on this dial rose from the already steep 25% typical for Grand Feu work to 50%.

Inside is calibre SXH5.1 with a platinum micro-rotor, running at 4Hz with a 60-hour power reserve. The seven skeletonized bridges reference the pocket watches of François Czapek, the Czech-born Polish watchmaker who co-founded Patek, Czapek & Cie in 1839. The Promenade Goutte de Rosée comes on a shiny green alligator strap.

The Promenade Goutte de Rosée is a limited edition of 25 pieces, available now, with deliveries beginning in June. Pricing is set at €34,600. See more on the Czapek 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

• Remember learning about figures of speech, like similes and metaphors, in your elementary-school English class? In this fun feature, The Pudding analyzed 200,000 similes from popular fiction. As cool as a cucumber. As hot as hell. “Once you start looking, you see them everywhere,” writes Russell Samora, “from the classics like Jane Eyre to last year’s darling Heart the Lover.” It’s impossible not to poke around this interactive piece, with design and illustration by Shelly Tan.

• I admit it, AI—and our complicity with it—continues to surprise me. For Wired, Reece Rogers recounts how he spent a week with an iPhone strapped to his forehead, recording himself doing mundane chores around the house, such as making a salad, pouring drinks, and tying his shoes, all in a bid to train the forthcoming generation of humanoid robots on how to do human tasks. Welcome to the latest iteration of the gig economy, where you sell your motor skills to what’s known as egocentric data collectors for pennies.

• Pine Island, Minnesota, is the setting for a famously confounding poem by James Wright. It’s also the future home of a Google-owned data center that will use more energy than the town’s 3,800 residents, along with the rest of the state’s households. In this beautifully idiosyncratic essay, Thomas John Weber brings copies of Wright’s poem to Pine Island’s front doors and sports bars, to ask locals for their thoughts on home, the looming data-center development, and what a “wasted life” really means.

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