BY HARLAN CHAPMAN-GREEN
This year marks 55 years of Grand Seiko designs. You may have figured something was up by the frequency of their releases currently. It’s mostly that, but we’re also in tumbleweed season, which is the quiet point after the annual expos but before the retail frenzy that is Xmas. The new watch draws on Grand Seiko’s heritage of exacting design and natural inspiration.
The dark blue of the night sky filled with the glow of moonlight around Grand Seiko’s Shinshu studio inspired this new creation with a dark blue dial and radiant pattern. To play with the light even further, the applied hour markers (and hands) have been given treatments of brushing and polishing. Based on the dark background and becoming a part of the 40mm x 10.5mm brushed/polished case, these details pop on the watch’s front. It helps that there’s no date window and minimal text to avoid distracting us. Paired with these details is a dark blue crocodile leather strap.
As you’ll have noted from the dial, the movement inside this watch is Grand Seiko’s signature mechanical and electronic timekeeping hybrid, Spring Drive. It fuses the fun of mechanical watchmaking, the springs to store power, elegant wheels and high-grade finishing with the accuracy of quartz regulation.
Unless you’re brand new to the hobby of watches, you’ll know that all mechanical watches became obsolete in the 1970s and 1980s when quartz watches and digital watches became popular. These watches were way more accurate than mechanical watches while also being more affordable. This affordability meant you could have multiple watches to choose your mood and style. It was this accessibility which created the Swatch watch. Ironically, the Swatch Group now owns and preserves some of the best mechanical watchmaking companies around. The in-house 9R31 calibre is manually-wound and has a power reserve of 72 hours. It’s accurate to within +/-1s per day, so twice as precise as Rolex claims its movements are.
Available in Grand Seiko boutiques and through selected partners, this watch is priced at €8200 and limited to 1500 examples.
Visit Grand Seiko here.
