Timex Makes The Atelier Better, A Fantastic Hanhart, And New Watches From FC, MG And Armin Strom

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👂What’s new

1/ Timex Makes The Atelier GMT Even Better With A Smaller Case

Timex launched its Atelier GMT less than a year ago, and it quickly became a massive argument that Timex might actually be able to make a step into a more upscale watch. In fact, the entire Atelier line kicks ass and gives the budget watchmaker something to be very proud of. The new Première M1a is the follow-up to the Atelier GMT and it pulls a new trick out of the bag – it shrinks down to a really nice size.

The case drops from 40mm to 38mm wide. Even better, the lug-to-lug is a pretty nice 46.11 mm. But don't get too excited just yet, because the thickness is 13.8 mm, and you can see in the side profile that it's a chunky watch. Timex combats this by not making it slab sided. Instead, there's a bunch of different-width planes that help break the profile up. The crown and a ring around the mid-case are now gold-finished. Water resistance is 50 meters, which could be better.

The bezel is now black and green, which will remind plenty of people of the Sprite colorway of the more popular GMT on the market. The gold continues on the dial with gilt indices and hands. That adds contrast, but it also pushes the watch toward a dressier look that some buyers of the first version won't want. The enamel dial remains unchanged, along with the lumed dauphine-style hands, lollipop seconds and the GMT hand. The lume is as bright as it was on the original.

Inside is the Swiss Landeron calibre 24, an automatic GMT movement you can see through a display caseback. It's the same calibre as before. You can choose a steel bracelet or an NBR rubber strap.

On rubber the Première M1a is priced at $1,350, and on the bracelet it is $1,450. Both are available now and are not limited. See more photos here and the watch on the Timex website.

2/ Hanhart Finally Puts Steve McQueen's Name on the 417 ES He Actually Wore

For the casual observer, Steve McQueen's watch story usually stops at the Monaco and the Submariner. And it makes sense. Not only are those notoriously famous watches, the Monaco is forever linked with his movie Le Mans. However, off set, and especially on his motorcycles, he often wore a Hanhart 417 ES, a German military pilot's chronograph from the 1950s. Hanhart has been reissuing the 417 since 2020, and now McQueen's grandchildren have signed off on putting his signature on the dial.

The steel case is 39mm wide, 13.3mm thick including its tall domed sapphire, with a lug-to-lug of 46mm. Finishing alternates brushed and polished surfaces. You get the fluted bidirectional bezel with its red insert, the red HyCeram pusher at four o'clock, and a screw-down crown stamped with Hanhart's old "h" logo. New for the 39mm variant is the screw-down sapphire caseback, which previously came only on the larger variants. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The dial barely departs from the 1950s original. Matte black base, white Arabic numerals, small seconds at nine and a 30-minute counter at three, with Light Old Radium lume on the numerals and hands. The hand tips bend down toward the dial to cut parallax, a detail from the military spec of the time. McQueen's signature sits small between the shockproof text and six o'clock.

Inside is the hand-wound AMT5100 M from AMT Manufacture, Sellita's upmarket workshop. It starts from the Sellita SW510 M, a Valjoux 7750 descendant, and adds a column wheel and flyback. It beats at 4Hz, with 58 hours of reserve and hacking seconds. The is instantly recognizable to McQueen fans, as it's what he wore in period: a Shell Cordovan cuff from Italian tannery Comipel and closed with a historical-logo pin buckle. Lug width is 20mm, so Hanhart's steel bracelet also fits.

The Hanhart 417 ES Steve McQueen Limited Edition No. 1 (ref. H705L.210-2110) is limited to 300 pieces, and it comes in a box that has a numbered plaque, a booklet, a card modeled on McQueen's 1964 racing licence and a small bottle of red nail varnish, a nod to the legend behind Hanhart's red pusher. Price is set at €2,890. See way more photos here and the watch on the Hanhart website.

3/ Frederique Constant Strips the Carrée Down to Two Hands and a Denim Dial

Denim watches are often the result of a collaboration between a watch brand and a jeans brand. And often it's a bit of a gimmick that just uses denim for the strap. Well, Frederique Constant agrees that there should be more to it. So with the new Classics Carrée Denim, their small rectangular dress model, they bring the fabric onto the dial and stripped away nearly everything else. It's still a bit of a gimmick, but a well-executed one.

The steel case is polished and keeps the Carrée's stepped flanks and onion crown. It measures 25.2mm wide, 36mm long and 5.85mm thick. People have been complaining that there aren't enough small watches, so there you go. Sapphire crystal on top, a steel caseback out back, and water resistance of 30 meters. Wear it like the dress watch it is and keep it dry.

The dial is indigo, brushed diagonally in white to mimic twill, white weft crossing blue warp the way it does on a pair of jeans. There are no indices, no minute track and no seconds, so the dial has only the logo and two polished hands, a spade for the hours and a leaf for the minutes. Telling the exact time takes some estimation, but it's a good looking watch so just make some compromises.

Inside is Frederique Constant calibre FC-200, a quartz movement based on the Ronda 1062, with four jewels and a battery rated for six years. It's thin, which is all it needs to be. The strap is real denim, lined in leather, trimmed in blue leather with white stitching, and closed with a steel buckle. Denim tends to fade and soften with wear, so it will be interested to see how patina develops.

The Frederique Constant Classics Carrée Denim, reference FC-200LB2C6, is available now, priced at CHF 895. It is not a limited edition. See more photos here and the watches on the Frederique Constant website.

4/ Moritz Grossmann Crosses Two Recent Benu Power Reserves to Make a Steel and DLC Pair

Moritz Grossmann rarely does steel, and when it does, it treats the metal just as preciously as it would a precious metal. Maybe even more so, since it's rare for them to use it. These two Benu Power Reserves take the brushed cases from the 12th-anniversary edition and fit them with last year's sector dials, nominally to mark 200 years since Moritz Grossmann was born. Mechanically nothing has changed. Visually, the combination just might be better than either of the watches it borrows from.

The three-part case is 41mm wide and 11.65mm thick, with the long, tapering lugs the Benu is known for. One is plain steel, the other steel with a grey DLC coating, and both are brushed with no polished surfaces. That matte finish suits the watch, as it is an oversized dress watch that creeps up into sports teritorry. Next to the crown sits the brand's patented pusher, which keeps dust out of the case when you pull the crown to set the time. It really is a very cool trick. You pull out the crown and it snaps back to the original position, instead of remaining pulled out. But, the act of pulling it out hacks the movement and allows you to set the time. When you’re done, hit the pusher at 4 o’clock and it will restart the movement.

The dial is grey and built on three levels. A smooth outer track with white minute numerals surrounds a snailed chapter ring that has applied Arabic numerals on every even hour except six. Inside that is a grained center with a sunken, smooth small seconds register. Between noon and the hand stack, a trapezoid window shows the linear power reserve: it's white when fully wound and fills with grey as the 42 hours run down. The hands are made by hand from polished, bevelled steel, with needle-thin tips and a closed rhombus as the minute hand's counterweight.

Through the caseback you can see the in-house, hand-wound calibre 100.2, a movement that adds a differential to the 100.1 to run the reserve display. It has a two-thirds plate with Glashütte ribbing, a hand-engraved balance cock and the Grossmann balance beating at a slow 2.5Hz. Power reserve is 42 hours. Both watches come on black kudu leather.

The Moritz Grossmann Benu Power Reserve in steel and in grey DLC steel are each limited to 18 pieces, priced at €40,800 before tax. See more photos here and the watches on the Moritz Grossmann website.

5/ Armin Strom Goes Solid Gold on the Tribute³ Au750

The Tribute is Armin Strom's more subdued line, the watch for people who like the brand's engineering but don't want a skeletonised movement staring that screams look at me. OK, to be fair, it's kind of hard to be subdued when you're fully made out of solid gold, but I would say it kind of works here. This is the new Tribute³ Au750 which keeps that calm face, but then slaps 18K rose gold into the case, the dials and the movement bridges.

The case is 38mm wide and 9.38mm thick (fantastic proportions), with sapphire on both sides and anti-reflective coating front and back. But from what I can tell in photos, it looks like there is no crystal, instead just a dial sitting there for you to touch. Unfortunately, you can't touch that beauty. Water resistance is 50 meters, but how much more should a gold dress watch have.

The main dial sits off-centre in solid rose gold, cut with a sunburst guilloché and marked with Roman numerals. The small seconds subdial gets a barleycorn grain d'orge pattern, and the exposed barrel sits under a polished gold bridge with finger-style arms. That's a lot of texture, but you need a lot of texture to break up the entirely gold dial. The grey PVD steel Breguet-style hands, new to the Tribute, do the same job: gold hands on this dial would have vanished.

Inside is the manual-wound calibre AMW21, designed in-house, with 97% of its components made by Armin Strom. Its motor barrel flips the usual arrangement: the arbor turns to wind the spring while the drum stays fixed. That saves space, so the movement measures just 33.5mm across and 4.2mm thick yet runs for 100 hours, beating at 3.5 Hz. Through the back you see a clou de Paris three-quarter bridge with hand-bevelled edges over a grey PVD mainplate. The watch comes on a grey nubuck strap with grey stitching and a pin buckle in rose gold.

The Tribute³ Au750 is limited to eight pieces, priced at CHF 69,000. See more photos here and the watch on the Armin Strom website.

⚙️Watch Worthy

• A review of the Zenith Chronomaster Solo Sport
• Hands on with the Chronoswiss PULSE GMT

⏲️End links

• Kate Manne, a philosophy professor at Cornell University, situates the lawsuit from a former student alleging she was gang-raped at the Chi Phi fraternity in 2024 within a broader, deeply troubling campus “rape culture.” The specific details of Jane Doe’s case are horrific, but Manne also points to shocking statistics and examples showing that sexual misconduct is rife and often taken less seriously than other student infractions. She is critical of Cornell’s response and culture, but emphasizes that, tragically, this normalization of misogyny is widespread across many American campuses. A disturbing, important read.
• “Who wouldn’t decide to be their most expansive and radiant self?” Ah, but would you pursue that self through a sheet of tempered glass? In this literal tour de force, Katherine Cusumano shadows wrestlers navigating the independent promoters of the Pacific Northwest, granting sensational access to the lives and ambitions behind elaborate personas you’ve never heard of and will almost certainly search YouTube for. Cusumano is note-perfect on the details, taking obvious delight in the gimmicks of each wrestler’s beloved character and relishing the complexity of the choreography, rehearsed in elaborate code. (“Clothesline, crossbody in the corner, clothesline, Superman, Superman, I’m fired up, whoop, sliced bread, Ricky catches, oh shit, real fast.”) Spectacle abounds, but Cusumano rises above it, way up on the turnbuckle, with a heartening consideration of how we understand our own stories, and what we devote to realizing them.
• During one of his son’s hockey games, Nick Paumgarten watches as his eight-year-old is hit from behind, only to rise to his feet and use his stick to hit the side of his opponent’s head. Alongside his concern for his son’s head and neck, Paumgarten, who has written about his own hockey-related concussions, rapidly processes the outcomes of the exchange: a game-deciding penalty, his own reflexive rationalization, and the evaluation of other parents who “held me in some way responsible, as both father and coach, for the violence and loss of self-control.” Paumgarten’s essay is rich with such moments of parent-coach double-consciousness, and sensitive to the numerous ways, some of them awful, in which those two identities intrude upon each other.

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Vuk

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