Yema Updates Granvelle With More Refined Renaissance; A New King Vanac; Charlie Paris Refreshes Alliance; An Icy Chronoswiss Delphis Glacier; Blancpain Makes Moves On Very Cool Fifty Fathoms Tech

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Now that Yema seems to have dug themselves out of quality control issues, they just keep making great watches. Great to see.

In this issue

• Yema Updates The Granvelle Collection With The More Refined Renaissance CMM.29

• King Seiko Brings Back The Vanac HKF004 In Silver And Blue For Seiko's 145th Anniversary

• Charlie Paris Refreshes The Alliance With Sapphire Dials And A Necessary Water Resistance Upgrade

• Chronoswiss Delphis Glacier Brings Glacial Ice Textures to a 30-Year-Old Watch With A Cult Following

• Blancpain’s Very Cool Fifty Fathoms Tech With Three Hour Bezel Makes Its Way To The Regular Collection

👂What’s new

1/

Yema Updates The Granvelle Collection With The More Refined Renaissance CMM.29

Yema has been doing something interesting lately. The brand best known for Superman divers, has been building a credible dress watch line with the Granvelle, a cushion-cased architectural piece named after the Museum of Time in Besançon. The original 2025 Granvelle led with a rare selling point: a manufacture micro-rotor movement at an accessible price. This new Renaissance CMM.29 keeps that proposition and refines everything around it.

The case drops from 39mm to 37.5mm, which is a very welcome change, especially due to the cushion shape and wide dial opening which make the watch appear a bit larger. It's 9mm thick including the crystal and has a lug-to-lug of 46.3mm, so you know this will be easy to wear. The redesigned lugs are a bit more elegant, the mixed polished, vertically brushed, and sunray-brushed surfaces are carried over, and the distinctive fluted caseband remains. The crown is new, redesigned specifically for this collection with alternating finishes and an embossed logo. Water resistance is 50 meters.

The original Granvelle dial used a stamped guilloché-inspired texture. The Renaissance takes it a step further, building the dial in layers: a central medallion engraved with geometric patterns drawn from the roof motifs of the Granvelle Palace, a recessed hour track, an outer chapter ring, and a small seconds display at nine o'clock. Different surface treatments across the layers mean the dial shifts character as the light changes. Applied faceted hour markers and polished hands carry Super-LumiNova BGW9. Colors are black, blue and salmon. Very nice.

The movement carries a new designation, calibre CMM.29, an evolution of the CMM.20 from the original Granvelle. It’s an automatic micro-rotor developed and produced in Yema's Morteau workshops, running at 4Hz with a 70-hour power reserve and a rated accuracy of -3/+7 seconds per day. The tungsten micro-rotor runs on ball bearings and is visible through the sapphire caseback on rhodium-plated bridges finished with a radiating Côtes de Genève pattern. The leather strap tapers from 18mm at the lugs to 14mm at the buckle, and the redesigned pin buckle mirors the cushion geometry of the case and crown.

The Yema Granvelle Renaissance CMM.29 is priced at €2,100 and is available now. See more on the Yema website.

2/

King Seiko Brings Back The Vanac HKF004 In Silver And Blue For Seiko's 145th Anniversary

The Vanac has had a good comeback run. King Seiko revived the angular, integrated-bracelet sub-line last year with a handful of new models, and the reception was strong enough to keep the momentum going. Now Seiko is adding a limited edition to the family, tying it to their ongoing 145th anniversary celebrations and the Seiko Blue color theme that dates to the 1960s. This is the new King Seiko Vanac HKF004.

That case is stainless steel, 41mm wide and 14.3mm thick, with a short lug-to-lug of 45.1mm. The Vanac's character comes from its angularity, and Seiko plays that up with a mix of brushed and polished surfaces across the case and the integrated bracelet. The bracelet links carry both finishes, mirror on some, brushed on others. The caseback carries a blue King Seiko shield logo pulled from the original 1960s emblem. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The dial is white, with blue details borrowed directly from the Seiko Blue language used elsewhere in the 145th anniversary lineup. A blue ring runs around the perimeter of the dial, breaking up all that white and creating contrast against the lighter center. The hands are also blue, and the hour markers have Lumibrite inserts for legibility in dim light. A horizontal stripe texture runs across the dial surface for a bit of depth. There are a few Vanac-specific design touches you'll notice: the V-shaped marker at 12 o'clock, and a matching V-shaped counterweight on the seconds hand.

Inside is the calibre 8L45, the same movement that powered last year's Vanac series. It's based on the Grand Seiko 9S65 architecture, beats at 4Hz, and delivers a 72-hour power reserve, with a rated accuracy of +10 to -5 seconds per day. Seiko exposes the movement through a sapphire caseback, where striped finishing is visible on the rotor, bridges, and plates. The watch ships on an integrated steel bracelet.

The King Seiko Vanac HKF004 is limited to 800 pieces, available from July 2026, and priced at €3,400. See more on the Seiko website.

3/

Charlie Paris Refreshes The Alliance With Sapphire Dials And A Necessary Water Resistance Upgrade

Not that they’re know as a brand with wild designs, but Charlie Paris’ Alliance has always been the more straightforward model for the French brand. Just a well-proportioned steel everyday watch at a price that doesn't require a lot of mental gymnastics to justify. The new Alliance lineup carries all of that forward and adds two interesting variants with semi-transparent sapphire dials, plus a water resistance jump from 30 to 100 meters.

The case is unchanged from previous Alliance models: 39.5mm wide and 9mm thick, with a mix of polished and brushed surfaces and circular brushing on the bezel. The double-domed sapphire crystal sits above, and with 100 meters of water resistance now on the spec sheet, this is a watch you can actually wear every day without much worry.

Five dial options are available: blue, silver-white, and sage green in the standard Alliance, plus blue and white in the Alliance Sapphire. The sage green is a great look, but I have a hunch the Sapphire versions will be super popular. The dial is a smoked semi-transparent sapphire disc that lets you see parts of the movement and the date wheel beneath, tinted in the corresponding dial color. Applied hour markers appear at 12, three, six, and nine o'clock with Super-LumiNova inserts, and a date display sits at six.

Power comes from the Swiss-made Soprod P024 automatic movement, the same calibre you'll find in plenty of other watches in this price tier. It's a sensible choice — reliable, easy to service, and essentially Soprod's take on the ETA 2824. It beats at 4Hz, has a 40-hour power reserve, and is rated to -0/+14 seconds per day. Strap options include coloured leather, rubber, or the H-link steel bracelet with brushed and polished surfaces and screw-down links.

Pricing starts at €895 for the standard Alliance on leather or rubber and €975 on the steel bracelet. The Alliance Sapphire runs €995 on leather or rubber and €1,075 on the bracelet. See more on the Charlie Paris website.

4/

Chronoswiss Delphis Glacier Brings Glacial Ice Textures to a 30-Year-Old Watch With A Cult Following

The Delphis has been part of Chronoswiss' identity since Gerd-Rüdiger Lang introduced it in 1996: a jumping hour at 12 o'clock, a retrograde minutes hand sweeping an arc, small seconds at 6. It's one of the most distinctive takes on the regulator concept in independent watchmaking, and the Lucerne brand has used it as a canvas for increasingly elaborate dials over the years. The new Delphis Glacier is another limited edition in that tradition, this time drawing its palette from Swiss glaciers.

The case is 42mm wide and 14.5mm thick, built from Grade 5 titanium and assembled from 17 individual components. The signature details are all there: fluted caseband, polished bezel, oversized onion crown. A cambered sapphire crystal with double-sided anti-reflective coating sits on top, a sapphire display caseback on the reverse, and water resistance is rated to 100 meters, which is genuinely better than you'd expect from something like this.

The dial divides into two zones. The upper section gets a silver galvanic finish with hand-guilloché patterns inspired by fractured glacial surfaces. Below it, the seconds sub-dial is finished in a rich blue CVD coating and decorated with its own hand-guilloché work, done in-house at the Chronoswiss Atelier. The retrograde minutes hand sweeps across the upper arc and snaps back at the top of the hour; the jumping hour changes instantly at 12. Both hands are skeletonised, which helps legibility against the contrasting textures underneath them.

The calibre C. 6004, developed by La Joux-Perret, powers the watch. It's an automatic running at 4Hz with a 55-hour power reserve, 37 jewels, a Glucydur balance, Nivarox hairspring, and Incabloc shock protection. Through the sapphire caseback you can see Geneva-striped bridges, polished screws, and a skeletonised tungsten rotor on ball bearings. The Glacier comes on a black rubber strap.

The Chronoswiss Delphis Glacier is a limited edition of 50 pieces. Price is set at €18.400. See more on the Chronoswiss website.

5/

Blancpain’s Very Cool Fifty Fathoms Tech With Three Hour Bezel Makes Its Way To The Regular Collection

I have an extreme soft spot for the Blancpain Fifty Fathoms Tech. Last year, this mega-diver became a staple in the regular Blancpain collection, and now they’re bringing a more conceptual version of the Tech back as well. The Tech collection draws its roots from the Tech Gombessa model, developed with explorer Laurent Ballesta, with a patented three-hour diving bezel that lets technical divers and rebreather users track extended bottom times the same way any diver reads a conventional 60-minute bezel. And it’s that three hour bezel that shows up on the new Ref. 5019A, alongside the more practical tool-free strap change system and date complication.

The Grade 23 titanium case measures 47mm wide and 14.81mm thick. It uses the same central lug construction introduced with the original Gombessa version. There’s no denying this is a massive watch, but thanks to me having huge wrists and the central lug giving the impression of a lugless watch, making it slightly more wearable than the numbers might suggest. That “slightly” is doing a lot of work here. Water resistance is 300 meters, and there's a helium escape valve at the 10 o’clock position.

The dial uses Blancpain's "Absolute Black" surface treatment, which absorbs up to 97% of incoming light. The design logic is legibility, and to reinforce it, the brand uses two different Super-LumiNova colors: blue-emission for all diving indications, including the three-hour hand and bezel scale, and green-emission for standard timekeeping. Hour markers and cardinal numerals are all in the green emission. There’s also a third hand done in bright orange that tracks the three hour dive time. The date aperture, despite being horribly positioned at 4.30 is well integrated.

Inside is calibre 13P5A, an automatic based on Blancpain's calibre 1315 with a triple-barrel construction that delivers a five-day power reserve at 4Hz. The strap system uses the central lug design for tool-free swaps and the watch ships on an orange rubber strap, with black and white rubber alternatives available separately.

The Blancpain Fifty Fathoms Tech Ref. 5019A is a permanent addition to the collection, priced at CHF 20,500. See more on the Blancpain 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

• A few weeks ago, a seven-year-old boy reached the top of El Capitan in Yosemite. For many, this was an extraordinary achievement: Joey Danger Evermore became the youngest person in history to ascend El Cap. But did he really climb it? Within the climbing community, some argue that the Evermore family’s style of ascent means the answer is no. Neither Joey, his brother, nor his father led or even cleaned any of the pitches. Instead, they relied on guides whose role may have crossed legal and ethical lines. According to reports, the boys were pushed to keep climbing through tears at their father’s urging. So where do we draw the line? When do we celebrate a climb, and when do we acknowledge that it should never have happened in the first place?

• “Come test wearable tech in Midtown!” Max Callimanopulos joins a few dozen Craigslist respondents for four hours of testing wearable technology prototypes for Meta, playing a series of boring videogames while his temperature, heart rate, and muscle movements are recorded for use by the company. “So far,” Callimanopulos writes of AI-powered wearable tech, “the pins, glasses, and pendants launched at us have been unwieldy, redundant, and irredeemably unsexy.” They also seem to accomplish very little, save for closing the distance between our bodies and the digital world.

• Sheila Liming recalls watching a university library discard books to make room for a renovation. To trash a library book is to deaccession it, and as she remembers what she learned studying Edith Wharton’s marginalia, Liming suggests we lose not only the text itself, but also the conversation that take place between a careful reader and the author that appear as comments, questions, and provocations in the margins.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

I’m getting a bit tired of the whole restomod trend, but a 325 horsepower engine that spins to 10k rpm and sits in a sub 900kg cool looking Escort? Yeah, give me more of that.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk