So, this is the New Year? 2025 began with a flurry of headlines as the watch world emerged from its restorative holiday hiatus. TAG Heuer revved its engines as it plans to take on the role of official F1 timekeeper, while Vacheron Constantin dropped the flag on a big year for anniversary releases with its steel 222. LVMH Watch Week, the first notable industry event of the year, had plenty of new releases covered by the ABTW team, and we also ensured that no watch was left behind thanks to our new release roundup, The Flyback. Elsewhere, the squad shared thoughts on topics like the stalled-out state of American watchmaking and the hair-tearing tendency of brands to treat new dial options as manna from heaven. It’s all here in our January 2025 roundup!
Recalling TAG Heuer’s History with Formula 1 Upon Its Return as F1’s Official Timekeeper
Take it from an F1 super-fan like ABTW Editor-at-Large David Bredan to properly recap the long relationship between “the pinnacle of motorsport” and TAG Heuer. Reminding us that the essence of the sport is “about time and its precise measurement,” he recounts key stories from the longstanding partnership between the Swiss watchmaker and this international sporting institution. David’s history touches on key moments such as when Enzo Ferrari looked to Jack Heuer’s Centigraph HL205 as a means of independent timekeeping to offset suspicions that the French racers were fudging the numbers. Now, in 2025, as TAG Heuer retakes the reigns as official timekeeper from Rolex, a new chapter begins.
Source: aBlogtoWatch
Vacheron Constantin Has Released a 222 in Stainless Steel for the Brand’s 270th Anniversary
Last seen three years ago as a nearly unattainable all-gold affair, Vacheron’s 222 came back down to earth last month in a new stainless steel variant. Like its 2022 cousin, it’s a nearly identical copy of the 1977 original with a 37mm diameter case that’s less than 8mm tall. Initial reactions to the blue dial (the only option available at press time) were mostly positive, making it likely that it’ll be another high-demand, boutique-only collector’s piece — at least for a while. Launching a new 222 is a fitting kick-off for the brand’s 270th year, an achievement that makes VC the oldest continually operating watchmaker. 2025 is a year of big milestones (more on that later), and with the new steel 222, it’s off to a roaring start.
Source: Worn & Wound
LVMH Watch Week 2025
Several years on, LVMH Watch Week (the conglomerate’s proprietary event) is starting to stand on its own two. It’s taken a while for the larger calendar of industry events to normalize in the wake of Baselworld’s demise, but LVMH Watch Week has settled into the “traveling circus” model, migrating from city to city each year. Having checked off Dubai, Singapore, and Miami in previous years, the 2025 event was bifurcated between New York and Paris and saw the introduction of some pretty impressive timepieces from Zenith, Hublot, and more. Key among them was TAG Heuer’s next-gen Formula 1 watches, arriving as a quartet of automatic chronographs in freshly designed titanium cases.
Source: aBlogtoWatch
Anniversaries and Milestones: What to Expect from the Watch Industry in 2025
Aside from being a nice, semi-round number, the year 2025 also represents a strange confluence of anniversaries across the watch world. In addition to it being Vacheron Constantin’s 270th year (scroll up for more on that), it’s also Breguet’s 250th birthday and AP’s 150th. Rolex also has a few opportunities to celebrate, with the GMT-Master turning 70, the Datejust turning 80, and the company marking 120 years in operation. There are plenty of others, as well, from Girard-Perregaux to Omega, Czapek, and more. Check out the full list over on Monochrome’s site.
Source: Monochrome Watches
Wait-a-Minute: There Will Be No Full-Scale Return of American Watchmaking
Mike Razak makes many cogent points in explaining why “Made In America” watches are mostly a thing of the past, but his argument is perhaps best summarized by pointing out that American watches “come with a price premium that consumers aren’t willing to pay because it doesn’t offer a commensurate increase in quality.” Ouch. While there will always be a market (albeit an extremely small one) for pieces like J.N. Shapiro’s Resurgence, some key factors are hampering any efforts to kickstart watchmaking stateside. Among them are the FTC’s rigid definition of American-made products, expensive labor, high upfront investment barriers, and a lack of demand. And that giant sucking noise? It’s the sound of European brands hoovering up graduates from American watchmaking programs.
Source: aBlogtoWatch
The Rolex That Survived the LA Fires
The recent fires that ravaged L.A. County touched millions in and beyond the SoCal area. One of thousands to lose their home was Kevin Cooley, an artist and photographer. In a story of grim coincidence, Cooley is not only a fire photographer, but his grandfather also lost his home to fires in L.A. in the 1960s. While Kevin’s house and possessions were consumed by the Eaton Fire in Altadena, he was able to escape with his wife, child, dog — and his grandfather’s watch. It’s a touching story with powerful imagery and a spot of hope in a dire moment for Los Angeles.
Source: Teddy Baldassarre
The Flyback: Oak & Oscar, Breitling, Grand Seiko, and More
We’ve got a new series! Last month, aBlogtoWatch introduced The Flyback, a biweekly roundup of under-covered watch releases from the previous fortnight. Covering each and every release in discrete posts is like drinking from a firehose, so Mike Razak (and company) has bottled up the best watches not covered elsewhere into a biweekly brew that’s ready to drink. So far, we’ve seen a lot, from Oak & Oscar to Richard Mille with everything you need to know summarized in around 100 words.
Source: aBlogtoWatch
Nothing Is Certain In 2025 Except Death And Taxes… And Rolex Price Increases
Over at Fratello, Lex Stolk breaks down Rolex’s pricing updates for 2025, and it’s clear that the best time to buy a Rolex was sometime in the past. Prices have gone up across the board but it’s not all bad news: steel, platinum, and Rolesium (the brand’s steel/platinum alloy) saw the smallest increases of only around 1%. On the other end of the spectrum, all-gold models without gems went up by 14%. There are plenty of insights in Stolk’s summary, but one of the most contextual is at the end. If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that brands sell their watches at whatever prices the market will bear. As he reminds us, “The point of the price increase is that it doesn’t affect Rolex.”
Source: Fratello Watches
New Release: Bulova Snorkel Watches with Hybrid Ceramic Cases
On the other end of the watch-pricing spectrum, Bulova hopped on the Moonswatch train last month with its new Snorkel line. Part of the burgeoning Oceanographer collection, the new watches are housed in a now-familiar composite case Bulova is calling “hybrid ceramic.” Hopefully, the Blue Tang variant will avoid the wrist-staining travails of the Mission to Neptune. In addition to the fun colors, the Snorkels have a retro 41mm shape and are priced at $350 USD. Armed with quartz movements and 100 meters of water resistance, they won’t be setting any performance records but make for a fun summer companion (although a January launch date is a bit of a head-scratcher.)
Source: aBlogtoWatch
Video: Slow Motion Microscope Inside a Watch
15 million subscribers just got a big introduction to Omega watches. In January, “the Slow Mo Guys” put an Apollo 8 Speedmaster under the microscope, using some seriously weird lenses to capture the precise functions of Omega’s Caliber 1869 on a sub-millimeter scale. As the channel’s name suggests, the slow-motion views of the movement’s choreography feature a surprising amount of clanging around. Even at 10x, the level of detail is just incredible. Skip to 8:49 to see the exact moment Omega called an emergency meeting in Biel.
Source: The Slow Mo Guys on YouTube
Grinding Gears: It’s About Time We Start Configuring Watches Like Cars
At month’s end, just as the buzz around the new 222 began to subside, David Bredan dragged it back into the conversation. He speaks for many of us in January’s Grinding Gears segment, bemoaning the silly way brands often herald incremental changes as some great favor to the customer community. “It took Vacheron Constantin two full years to follow up with what looks to be the exact same watch — in steel, with one dial option.” VC isn’t alone in this trend. Most of the established brands are also guilty of this lazy approach to watch releases. True, it’s an improvement on the once-a-year release dump at the big watch shows, but in a world where any chump with a screwdriver and a spare bezel can customize a G-Shock, brands need to ask themselves, “Are we giving our customers choices? Or are we choosing for them?”
Source: aBlogtoWatch
Trumponomics 2.0: What Prospects for the Watch Industry?
Only in our little corner of the internet would we crowd around and ask, “What does a Trump White House mean for my watch collection?” Fortunately, we can sit at the knee of
Source: Europa Star
The 10:10 Position of Hands is so Deeply Rooted in Watchmaking that AI Can’t Generate Anything Different
As the grotesque AI-generated image above shows, machine-learning models have a bias for the “10:10” hand placement. That’s because, for decades, the default for watch photographers (and then digital renders) was to place watch hands in the position that subconsciously made people think of a smiling face. Now, AI models scraping the web for images are so firmly anchored in believing that analog watches can, should, and always display hands in this position, that anything different is scarcely possible. Brice Goulard at Monochrome goes in-depth on why it turns out to be very hard to teach a new dog new tricks.
Source: Monochrome Watches