The great Swiss watch manufacturer Omega took the polar opposite approach to archrival Rolex’s conservatism during the turbulent 1960s and 70s. If Rolex was almost entirely unwilling to deviate from their main design concepts and stayed restrained in the face of the funky fashions sweeping the watch world, Omega was ready and willing to try a little bit of everything to capture the spirit of the times and the dollars, francs, pounds and yen of the trendsetters of that era. As characteristic of the 1970s as boot cut jeans and polyester leisure suits, Omega’s chunky and near Pop-art chronographs of this period make a retro statement like few other watches. They’re not to everybody’s taste to be sure but for those that enjoy wearing these colorful beasts there’s great fun to be had by taking a time trip to the past.

Jumping off from their enormously successful Speedmaster Professional (aka “The Moonwatch”), Omega decided to let their design team smoke a little of the good stuff and have some fun creating a new range of Speedmaster and Seamaster chronographs incorporating newly developed case shapes and calibers. At first designs like the Speedmaster Mark II & III had the traditional black dials/white hands like their predecessor but soon a veritable rainbow of colors was busting out all over. The newly launched manual wind caliber 861 and new automatic chrono caliber 1040, both Lemania-based, seemed to lend themselves to inventive case shapes and color schemes, as Omega chased fashion trends with massive tonneau cases and dispensed with conventional lugs altogether.

Omega cal. 861 housed in “Anakin” case

Of course, as a proud supplier to NASA, Omega were also intent on expanding on their “Professional” line to be maximally useful to the aeronautic industry. Continue reading →

There are a lot of hobbies out there and a lot of collectibles. So how is it that one guy chooses comic books or baseball cards or Impressionist paintings and another guy chooses watches? Well, I can only speak for myself and my own obsession with wristwatches but I wouldn’t be surprised if all of those interests had a common source rooted in our childhood.

For me, the watch enchantment started when I was a kid and my dad and I would take long drives up to his house in Western New York (Upstate, as we always called it, the term Upstaters love to hate). Now this was a long drive in an old red Volvo so it took a bit over 5 hours on a good day. My parents being separated, these road trips had a special magic for me, to spend so much alone time with my dad while he steadily drove northward away from the City. And aside from our talking and catching up, he would invariably hand me his Omega chronograph, which I believe he had got working as an ad man on the brand’s account. It took me some years to remember it correctly but I finally realized it was this one:

A Speedmaster Professional Mark II with exotic “Racing” dial. Continue reading →