William L. 1985 is the Kickstarter-funded brainchild of Guillaume Laidet, who asked himself a simple question: what if you made a modern, reliable, unapologetically vintage-styled watch for next to nothing? The answer seems to be, at least in this case, build it, and they will come. Fresh from the big success of his quartz watch lineup, which offers amazingly attractive vintage-style quartz chronographs starting at under €200, he's made good on his original promise in his Kickstarter to do the same thing with automatic watches.
The same basic idea is at play here for the automatics, as for the quartz watches: take the best of vintage styling, find an affordable and above all, bulletproof movement, and put the lion's share of manufacturing costs into making sure that you have something that looks good and is built to last. There are two lines: the Automatic Vintage Diver 70s Style, and the Automatic Classy (the latter especially reflecting Laidet's sense of humor; you can't be taking yourself too seriously if you're calling your own watch Classy). The most expensive models are the €399 Classy Automatics, while the Diver 70s Style watches are just €349.
In the Automatic Classy watches, for your €399 you get a 40 mm 316L stainless-steel case, water resistant to 10ATM/100 meters. The dauphine hands are coated with Super Luminova and are easily visible under just about any lighting conditions you care to name; the strap is leather and comes with "easy bar" spring bars so that you can swap out straps without having to use any other tool than your fingernail (a great plus for consumers and something more brands should do). You have, rather amazingly enough, a sapphire crystal and the watch is powered by a Miyota caliber 8215. You can, if you want, look at the movement through a display back and of course, for €399, you can't and shouldn't expect any fine hand finishing. Thankfully, William L. 1985 isn't messing around with a bad imitation of hand finishing either, opting instead to spend money on things like good water resistance and a sapphire crystal instead of perfunctory movement pseudo-decoration that will be a source of disappointment to the new owner the minute he or she begins to learn about watches.
As much as calling a watch Classy might seem an invitation to sarcasm, these guys actually measure up pretty well. As a matter of fact, they compare pretty favorably in a lot of respects to watches I've seen from other Swiss brands at much higher prices (which gets me wondering about margins . . . again). If Swiss Made on the dial means a lot to you, or if for some reason you can't stomach a Miyota caliber (and no judgement there, some people won't care for it no matter how mechanically reliable it is) then this isn't your brand of Chasselas (or saké, as the case may be), but if you take a broad-minded view of provenance in entry level watchmaking and think that finish be damned, if this is my first automatic watch I want to see the mechanism, then this is a great addition to the very small group of sub-$500/€500 watches that you won't be sorry you bought five minutes after you bought one.
For some reason, it is often very difficult to find a nice, clean, simple mechanical watch in this price range. Fossil does mechanical offerings in the same ballpark, but they seem to have a menacing affinity for rather floridly dramatic open dials.
My own personal sentimental favorite, however, are the Vintage Diver 70s Style watches. God knows the 70s weren't in general a stylish time and watches were not spared. There were any number of extremely ungainly, clunky watches vying for attention, for some reason, with excessively thin quartz watches that tried to go ultra thin mechanicals one better and largely seemed to succeed only in parodying them instead – but there were still some timepieces that managed to not exhibit too much hysteria either way, and many of them were dive watches (like this sub-40mm but really gorgeous vintage Zodiac Sea-Wolf whose restoration we reviewed not long ago). If you like everything about dive watches – their aura of pragmatism, the way the best of them take the utilitarian and elevate it to an aesthetic – but you don't like how big they seem to come, you'll like these: 38.5 mm in diameter, uni-directional bezel, 100 m water resistant with a screw-down crown and sapphire glass (in case you are wondering the minimum depth rating for a watch to be ISO compliant as a dive watch is 100 m, so you're covered). They feature the same hand-winding, Japan-made Miyota 8125 as in the Classy watches.
They're just €349 and if you've really a yen to look like you're standing on the fantail of Jacques Cousteau's Calypso circa 1975, I'd drop another €39 on the 18 mm steel mesh bracelet.
The only real potential gotcha I can see here is that what you do not get for your sapphire crystals is anti-glare coating, the absence of which is especially noticeable in the Classy Automatics. Yes, they have a gorgeous domed sapphire crystal, which, if the light hits it just wrong, will turn into a gorgeous domed panoramic mirror. And sure, there is room for the view that plexiglass crystals would have been a bit more "vintage." However, this is a minor quibble. The fact that William L. 1985 is delivering sapphire says something about the overall approach, which is to maximize quality and style without dispensing with clean design and longevity. Yes these are a ton of quality for the price, but they're also just solid watches, period, and a great way to get into mechanical watches without breaking the bank (or even the piggy bank).
William L. 1985 can be visited online right here.
Our launch coverage of the quartz chronographs, which are still the best bang for the buck in vintage-style quartz watches out there, is here.
No comments:
Post a Comment