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- TAG Releases Las Vegas-Themed Pink Monaco; Casio Pays Homage To Iconic Mini Calculators; Bremont Brings GMT To The Supermarine 300m; Mühle-Glashütte's Big Date Teutonia; And AP Teams Up With KAWS
TAG Releases Las Vegas-Themed Pink Monaco; Casio Pays Homage To Iconic Mini Calculators; Bremont Brings GMT To The Supermarine 300m; Mühle-Glashütte's Big Date Teutonia; And AP Teams Up With KAWS
Opulent nothingness has to be the best description I've heard of an artist in a long while
Vuk Radic
November 20, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 19 minutes
Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Sorry for the late send today. The kid is sick again and I was putting the finishing touches on the review of the Gagà Laboratorio Labormatic that’s now available for paid subscribers. It took a while to finish it, but people are already saying it’s the best one I’ve done so far, so thanks for the compliments!
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In this issue:
TAG Heuer Releases A Very Pink Monaco Chronograph In Time For The Las Vegas Formula 1 Grand Prix
Casio Pays Homage To Their Iconic Mini Calculators With New Colors For The More Iconic Calculator Watch
Bremont Gives The Supermarine 300 Dive Watch A GMT Function In Multiple Colorways
Mühle-Glashütte Celebrates 30 Years Of Company And 20 Years Of Teutonia With Big Date Edition 1994
Audemars Piguet Releases The Royal Oak Concept Tourbillon Companion With Pop Artist KAWS
👂What’s new
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Ever since I can remember watching Formula 1 live, the cars used to race by bright green signs that read Rolex. The two brands seemed forever linked. However, it takes a bit more than tradition to keep sponsorships together, and it seems that Rolex has had enough sponsoring the most famous racing organization in the world. Instead, the already motorsport-aligned TAG Heuer is taking over. And while they are still not the official sponsor of the entire racing series, they are sponsoring the (current) most dominate driver Max Verstappen and his team, Red Bull. Formula 1 is coming to Las Vegas for the second time and TAG Heuer is giving us a glimpse at what we can expect when they take over the entire sponsorship. This is the new TAG Heuer Monaco Chronograph Skeleton in pink. The second I saw it I was sure that the race was happening in Miami, since it looks exactly what you would expect a Miami-themed watch to look like, but I won’t hold it against them.
This new Monaco Chronograph Skeleton comes in a case we all know, measuring 39mm wide, 15.2mm thick and with a 47.4mm lug-to-lug. It’s made out of titanium, but instead of silver it comes in a black DLC coating with a sandblasted surface. A chunky watch it is, definitely not made for every wrist, but made a bit more manageable with the use of titanium. The bevelled sapphire crystal on top remains the same, as does the 100 meters of water resistance.
The dial is skeletonized, but only to a degree. There’s a black base that has cutouts to see inside the movement and holds the white minute track and black indices with bright pink lume. The indices are particularly cool as they also serve as bridges for the sub-dials, the logo and the date arrow. Speaking of the date, you can see the entire skeletonized date wheel through the dial, with the correct one being displayed underneath the arrow at 6 o’clock. The same bright pink as the lume on the indices can be found on the two square sub-dials: 30-minute totaliser at 3 and 12-hour totaliser at 9 o’clock. The black gold and faceted hour and minutes hands get white painted lume that glows blue. The central chronograph hand is also lacquered bright pink.
Inside is the in-house automatic Calibre Heuer 02 with a column-wheel and vertical clutch architecture. It beats at 4Hz and has a very decent 80 hour power reserve. Decorations include a black openworked rotor with pink writing and Geneva stripes. The watch comes on a combination embossed black calfskin leather and rubber strap with a DLC-coated titanium folding clasp.
The new TAG Heuer Monaco Chronograph Skeleton is available now and, surprisingly, TAG doesn’t say it’s a limited edition. Price is set at €11,100. See more on the TAG Heuer website.
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From musical instruments to iconic watches, Casio has done it all. And they’ve been doing it for long enough for many of these items to become iconic in popular culture. For example, their 1972 Casio Mini was their first compact personal calculator and just look at it in the picture above. Tell me it’s not a piece of design genius. Now, it’s not exactly a round anniversary year for the release of the Casio Mini that can be celebrated, but I don’t particularly care. Because I’m very happy with the new variations of the CA-53WB calculator watch that get heritage colors lifted from the Casio Mini. This will be a must buy for pretty much everyone.
You know the Casio calculator watch very well, but let’s go over the details of this model. It comes in a case that’s made out of bio-resin, weighing just 25g and measuring 34.4mm wide, 8.2mm thick and with a 43.2mm length, with an integrated strap made out of the same bio-resin. New for this variant are the three new colors — black, ivory and a spectacular blue-green.
On top is a negative LCD screen which has very much retro green text. The font on the keypad, as well as its grid lines, was designed to match the font from the old calculator. There’s also a red mode indicator at the upper right corner which is another nod to the Casio Mini. Features include a calculator (duh), a stopwatch, a secondary time zone and an alarm.
The new Casio CA-53WB goes on sale in December for a pretty spectacular price, one that we are very familiar with — $36. Give me all three! See more on the Casio website.
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After a few months of skepticism, Bremont is trying to release as many watches that will appeal to as broad an audience. So now they are releasing a new version of their flagship diver, the Supermarine 300m and they are giving it a GMT movement. Diver GMT watches are one of my favorite niches, and these look fine, but they still can’t shake the generic look that the redesign of the entire brand brought to the Supermarine 300m.
Based on the new Supermarine 300m, this watch looks familiar on the outside. The case is made out of 904L steel is identical in shape and size. OK, not all the proportions. Thickness has increased to 13mm, which is still very much OK, while the width remains at 40mm and lug-to-lug at 48mm. On top is a bi-directional bezel with two-tone aluminium insert with a 24-h scale. They now come in three color combinations — black/blue, black/red and black/green, all with matching dials. As the name suggests, water resistance is 200 meters.
Moving on to the dial, it’s surrounded with a rehaut that holds the 60 second scale. The three dial colors all feature a slight gradient and are named Glacier Blue, Ember Red and Tundra Green. There are applied dot and trapezoidal-shaped markers for the hours, along with an inverted arrow at 12 o’clock, all heavily lumed, while the hands are arrow-shaped. The GMT hand has an orange arrow tip filled with lume.
Inside, a slight disappointment at this price. It’s a slightly modified Sellita SW330. It’s a caller-style GMT movement, meaning you independently adjust the GMT hand, it beats at 4 Hz and has a 50 hour power reserve. The watch can be had on a multi-link steel bracelet or a rubber strap.
The Bremont Supermarine 300m GMT Tundra Green is part of the regular collection, the Glacier Blue is limited to 500 pieces and the best looking of the three, the Ember Red, is limited to 200 pieces, and they are all available now. Price is set at €4,300 on rubber and €4,600 on steel. See more on the Bremont website.
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Glashütte is a tiny town just south of Dresden in Germany with a bit more than 7,000 people living in it. And despite its small size, the town’s name has become synonymous with German watchmaking. Which is not really surprising, seeing as how ten major watchmaking brands make their watches there - A. Lange & Söhne, Bruno Söhnle Uhrenatelier Glashütte, C. H. Wolf, Glashütte Original, NOMOS Glashütte, Wempe Chronometerwerke, Tutima, Union Glashütte, Moritz Grossmann and Mühle-Glashütte. An impressive lineup for a small town. Some brands reach back into history, while others, like Mühle-Glashütte are revivals of old brands. The modern Mühle-Glashütte was revived in 1994 and now they are marking 30 years of the company and 20 years of the Teutonia model with the new Teutonia IV Big Date Edition 1994.
As the name suggests, this is the fourth iteration on the Teutonia in 20 years and it now comes in a brushed and polished stainless steel case that measures 41mm wide, 12.6mm thick and with a substantial lug-to-lug of 51.6mm. That length isn’t that surprising once you see how long the slightly curved lugs that attach to the fully round case are. Water resistance is 100 meters.
There two dial options on the new Teutonia model — either a sunray brushed ice blue version or a matte anthracite blue version that has deep horizontal grooves cut into it. Both feature applied polished markers and lance-shaped hands. But the big appeal will certainly be the big date function that’s somewhat uncommonly set at 6 o’clock and made up of two oversized apertures to show the current date.
Inside is the MU9424-GD movement, the first Mühle movement featuring an in-house developed big date module. It features the Mühle woodpecker neck regulation and a special-edition rotor with a gold-coloured 30-year-anniversary logo, while offering 41 hours of power reserve. The watch can be had on either a black leather strap, a blue suede strap or a multi-link metal bracelet.
The new Mühle-Glashütte Teutonia IV Big Date Edition 1994 is limited to 155 pieces per dial color and is available now. Price is set at €3,150 on suede, €3,200 on leather and €3,350 on the steel bracelet. See more on the Mühle-Glashütte website.
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While I genuinely have nothing against KAWS’ aesthetic on a surface level, I wouldn’t exactly go as far to call him an influential artist. And yet, that’s exactly what he is profiling himself as. But the best description of KAWS as an artist I’ve ever heard is that you start collecting KAWS once you’re done collecting Funko Pops. You will often see KAWS sculptures alongside Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons in houses owned by people like Drake and Steve Aoki. The same person who compared KAWS to an expensive Funko Pop also noted that KAWS’ entire output is “opulent nothingness” and I guess that’s exactly spot on. So, does it then make sense that KAWS is teaming up with Audemars Piguet on the Royal Oak Concept Tourbillon “Companion”?
At it’s base, the Royal Oak Concept is the most extravagant of the Royal Oak models and has served as an experimentation platform for AP, be it new designs or new technical advancement. The case of the Companion is made out of sandblasted titanium, measures 43mm wide and features satin brushed and polished surfaces. The iconic hexagonal screws on the hexagonal bezel on top have been reworked to feature the KAWS trademark X. More “X” symbols can be found on the satin-brushed frame of the display case back alongside Kaws’s signature. The crown is made of black ceramic.
The dial is completely replaced with the “Companion”, a minimalist figure with those X eyes that KAWS often uses in his work. Here, the Companion is pressed up on the sapphire crystal, holding his hands up as if he is trapped inside and staring out. There’s a metaphor to be made here, but I’ll skip it. Below the Companion’s skull is a one-minute tourbillon. But perhaps most interesting is the fact that AP has completely moved the hands from the centre of the dial. In fact, there are no more hands to speak of. Instead, the watch has two triangles that point to the titanium rehaut and are driven by visible gear wheels, telling the time.
Inside is a new movement, the hand-wound AP2979 Tourbillon which beats at 3Hz and has a 72 hour power reserve. You can see its unusual decoration from the backside, as it’s made to look like a padded piece of black foam, another one of KAWS’ signature looks. The watch comes with a light grey calfskin strap embossed with a textile effect and a slate grey calfskin strap.
The new Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Concept Tourbillon Companion is limited to 250 pieces and priced at CHF 200,000. Without taxes. And sure, I understand that AP is attempting to reach a new clientele, young people with incredible resources to spend, and I really want them to connect. I just think that there are better artists to do so with than KAWS. See more on the Audemars Piguet website.
🫳On hand
Our selection of the best reviews we stumble upon
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⚙️Watch Worthy
A look at an off beat, less known watch you might actually like
While Armitron classifies the Ridgemont and Metro as two distinct models, the watches themselves are largely identical, and the differences between them are primarily limited to their dials and bracelets. The Armitron Metro models are characterized by transparent dials paired with mesh-style bracelets, and the ref. 20/5601BKGPBK featured here embraces a black and gold colorway with a gold-tone case, a smoked transparent dial, and a black-finished mesh bracelet. Meanwhile, the Armitron Ridgemont lineup is a bit more diverse, and while all of the Ridgemont models are paired with folded-link bracelets, the dials and case finishing can differ between the various references.
⏲️Wait a minute
A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting
If you think your first dial-up modem was slow, consider: the first undersea communications cable was laid in 1866 and took 16 hours to deliver a 98-character telegraph from the UK to the US. Today there are hundreds of thousands of miles of cable running along the bottom of the ocean, much of it duplicative, so you can Instagram with no lag—but only a single cable runs to Tonga, which ended up severed from all global communications when a piece of that cable was destroyed by an undersea volcano eruption. The internet really is just a bunch of tubes, most of them are in the ocean, and installing and maintaining them is no small feat.
George Orwell famously argued that clear language in politics can be a bulwark against oppression. But in the Trump era, his solution no longer holds. This is something even he didn’t anticipate.
While digging for clams, Sophie McBain reflects on how we treat the food we gather for ourselves differently. She argues that “all purchased food is at some level alienating; the economic transaction is salient and central, while the essential transaction—the moral and ecological transaction—between two groups, the eaters and the eaten, is elided.”
👀Watch this
One video you have to watch today
Not a video I would expect to see today. Sure, we all know that trends are cyclical, but I never expected that kids would find VHS and audio tapes, as well as CDs to be the hip thing to listen to. It makes sense and it feels like it’s too soon for these to be cool again. Or I am too old. Anyway, The Verge has a really great video on modern tape and CD players and how they stack up agains some of the extremely cool tech we used when we were kids.
💵Pre-loved precision
Buy and sell your watches. Think of this section like old school classifieds - i don’t guarantee anything except that a bunch of people will see your ad and I’ll put the buyer and seller in touch. Want to advertise your watch? Contact us
LOOKING TO BUY: Here’s a crazy request. One of you is looking to buy the Lotēc No. 7.5. Sure, it’s a big ask, but if any of you have one and want to sell, reach out to and I’ll put you in touch
SOLD: Well, not really new. It’s a great looking mid-90s Tudor Submariner 75090, offered for sale by a member of the It’s About Time reader crew. I love the way it looks and seems to be in great condition. Check it out over on Chrono24.
LOOKING TO BUY: One of our readers is looking to purchase three very specific watches: an Islander ISL-133 Mother of Pearl, a Sinn 556 Mother of Pearl or a Zelos 300m GMT Mosaic Mother of Pearl. If you’re selling any of these, reach out to us and we’ll put you in touch
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-Vuk
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