Into the brave (newsletter-only) future A quick announcement. Rescapement.com will be sunset by the end of October 2022. I’ve had this Squarespace website and domain for four years now, and given updates in my career (more to come on this soon!), it’s no longer needed. But fear not. “Rescapement” will still exist. Its format is about to change, as I’ll soon talk about. It’ll be hosted entirely on Substack, the platform that I’ve long used to send out our weekly newsletters. In addition to my coming career change, Substack has also improved its product tremendously — things like SEO, discovery ..read more

It almost feels cliche to be writing about another watch with a bright, colorful dial in 2022. But the truth is that Nomos beat a lot of its peers to this trend. It’s been slowly adding colorful dial options to its lineup of minimalist watches over the last few years, long before a certain brand that rhymes with Nolex made the practice feel mainstream. But this year’s introduction of a blue-purple and pink dial to its “entry-level” (a phrase I despise) Club Campus might be the Glashutte brand’s best effort yet. First, a quick introduction to the Nomos Club Campus. It’s Nomos’ watch that’s de ..read more

Why I'm optimistic about the future of collectors It’s hard to define a “collector” without quickly devolving into aphorisms about how you know it when you see it.1 Here’s how Breitling historian Fred Mandelbaum defined a watch collector in our Significant Watches interview: “Being a collector is not just about owning watches. You start being a real collector when you start to understand how little you know and how much you have to learn. It’s scholarship, it’s research, it’s very often friendship and understanding who to trust. A true collector needs to have an urge to pass it on — to pass o ..read more

I’m in Love with the Shape of You Usually when we think of “shaped watches,” we think of Cartier, more specifically the Crash. But it’s time to expand your mind. There’s so much more to be discovered in the world of eccentric geometry outside of le maison.[1] Watches that make you ponder the psychedelic, the transcendental, the very limits of consciousness. Let’s take a look at just a couple examples. Falcone Falcone with day, date, and moon-phase, and enamel dial. Sold at Christie’s for CHF 35k in 2013. In the 1980s, Dino and Roberto Falcone, father & son watch- and casemakers ..read more

Rescapement does video for the first time; give our first YouTube video a watch I’ve wanted to do YouTube videos for a while. But the truth is: they’re hard. So here’s my first effort. It’s on a subject I know and love: the Cartier Crash. After Loupe This auctioned an original London Crash for $1.5 million in May 2022, I thought it was time to tell the story of the watch. I hope to do more with video in the coming months — reviews (of my watches and press watches),1 histories like this video, and tons more. There’s not much original footage for this video; to be honest, this is me learning how ..read more

AnOrdain Model 2 Handmade enamel dial in a field watch? It works The enamel dial-makers from Scotland. If you know AnOrdain, this is probably what you know about the Glasgow, Scotland-based workshop and design studio founded in 2015. The brand has perfected the technique of producing vitreous enamel dials (more on this in a moment), but managed to do so in a way that doesn’t feel inaccessible or stuffy, the way old-school horology so often does. AnOrdain’s first release was the Model 1 in 2018, quickly following it with the Model 2, the Glasglow brand’s take on a field watch. It was a huge su ..read more

An Apollo XI astronaut's Omega Speedmaster 'Apollo XI' Astronaut Michael Collins flew Apollo XI to the moon, joined by his crewmates Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong. When Armstrong and Aldrin hopped into the lunar module, eventually landing on the moon to make that “one small step,” Collins stayed behind in command module Columbia. Of course, the Speedmaster was the crew’s watch of choice on the trip, and now, Collins’ commemorative Apollo XI Speedmaster is up for auction. More on Collins’ Speedmaster in a moment, but I enjoyed some of these tidbits about Collins while he was alone in Columbia ..read more

All images courtesy of Subdial I wrote an in-depth article for Subdial on what many consider to be among the best modern automatic movements ever, the Chopard caliber 1.96: “The list of automatic movements that might seriously lay claim to the title of ‘best automatic movement ever produced’ is short. Ask around and you might get answers like the Patek Philippe 27-460, the brand’s second automatic caliber; the Jaeger-LeCoultre caliber 920 (adopted by Audemars Piguet, Patek, and others, and used in the original Royal Oak and Nautilus); or legendary calibers from Rolex and Omega.  But one ..read more

Watches have been a great investment over the past decade or so, according to guys like Kevin O’Leary at least. The money-making gambit has focused in particular on the modern hype watches from Rolex, etc. And if you look at auction results from the past week, it seems like the rocket ship is still flying irrationally close to the sun for some of these watches. I could point to any number of lots, but the two most egregious examples are probably this “Tiffany Blue” Rolex Oyster Perpetual and this modern Rolex Daytona, both of which sold for CHF 69,300 at Christie’s; crazy numbers for watches ..read more

Google “how does a mechanical watch work” and you’ll no doubt find all kinds of articles or video explainers designed to answer your query. But this post, simply titled Mechanical Watch, by Bartosz Ciechanowski, is the best. Ciechanowski is a programmer who creates beautiful, interactive articles about math, science, and engineering. Lucky for us, he recently took the mechanical watch as his most recent subject. The article builds a mechanical watch from the ground up, using 100+ interactive images to illustrate every single component of the watch. You start with the mainspring, then build th ..read more