What are the moonage watches?
On Christmas Day 1969, a few days before my third birthday, the release of the Seiko Astron heralded the beginning of the quartz age (otherwise known as the “quartz crisis” because of its catastrophic impact on the traditional Swiss watch industry). The following year a number of Swiss watches based on the Beta 21 quartz movement appeared. Although these were all eye-wateringly expensive novelties at the time, the next five years saw prices plummet and quartz gradually take over as the dominant wristwatch technology.
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From the mid-1970s onwards, mechanical watches became functionally obsolete. Although the mechanical watch industry was revived and remains the basis of the “luxury” watch industry today, its rasion d’etre had changed forever. After the early 1970s, if you designed a mechanical wristwatch its primary function was (effectively) highly intricate jewellery, not practical timekeeping. Of course accurate timekeeping was still an objective, but this could now only ever be secondary, because a budget quartz watch would always perform better.
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What I call the “moonage watches” were the watches made right at the end of the era when mechanical horology was still the most advanced technology available for personal timekeeping. After this, the priorities of mechanical watch design and marketing were necessarily different. Now lacking a primarily practical focus, traditional horology became decadently complicated at best and wholly style-orientated and superficial at worst, culminating in the rather bloated, fashion-and-status dominated industry we see today.
Fortunately, the last few years of the old-school mechanical watch industry saw an avalanche of technical and design innovations that ushered it out with a massive creative bang rather than a whimper. Watches manufactured between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s represent the ultimate development of mass produced, functional mechanical timepieces. Escapement beat rates increased to 4Hz in many watches and, for the first time, to 5Hz in some. Movement hacking became more common, as did day-date complications (bizarrely, these are quite rare today). By this period practically all watches used high tech alloys in their hairsprings and balance wheels making for much greater resistance to temperature variation, while water, shock and magnetic resistance were improved and synthetic lubricants were being used for the first time. The automatic watch was fully perfected with a range of different ingenious solutions to bidirectional winding developed in parallel by different companies. Finally, because of the sheer scale of the mechanical watch industry prior to and at the start of the quartz crisis (a legacy of a time when everyone needed a mechanical watch), many or most watches still used in-house calibres, because production volumes justified the considerable investment required to develop them. While these weren’t necessarily superior to the ETAs and other calibres that became ubiquitous in mass produced watches in later years, the much greater diversity of fundamentally different movements simply make watches of this period more interesting to anyone interested in functional horology.
On the aesthetic side, this period saw the massive cultural upheavals of the late 1960s and 1970s subtly (and towards the end of the period , less subtly) expressed through vibrant new industrial design trends applied within a space that was necessarily disciplined by scale and function. Although a lot has been made in retrospect of isolated “iconic” designs in high-end watches such as the AP Royal Oak, much less has been said about other designs of the period that were actually far more influential (so much so, in fact, that we forget they didn’t exist before the mid-1960s). The most notable of these is perhaps the so-called “c-case”, another Gerald Genta creation that debuted in Omega’s Constellation line in 1964. This organic, tonneau shaped design in which the lugs are formed by an uninterrupted extension of the rounded curves of the case sides, with a continuous convex upper surface tapering towards the lug-ends and usually with a brushed finish, came to be used by almost every major watch brand from the late 1960s right through until the late 1970s. Although another trend in the early part of this period was for relatively conservative round-cased watches with large dials and narrow bezels, these nonetheless had a highly distinctive style with straight, narrow lugs sporting mirror-polished chamfers. The 1970s, on the other hand, saw an explosion of increasingly wild case designs from cushion cases through to massive block-like, faceted forms that could only have existed in that decade. By this time, the c-case and similar designs had largely replaced the round case as the ubiquitous, more conservative option. Dials and hands started out with minimalist sunburst silver dials with very narrow applied markers and narrow baton hands, and progressed to wildly coloured gradient dials with massive faceted, block-like markers. Dial finishes were also highly varied, from vertically or horizontally brushed to linen and other strongly textured effects.
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Fascinatingly, these trends in the Swiss mechanical watch industry were mirrored in Japan, although the same developments often took slightly different parallel paths. Shortly after the Swiss watch industry started using the c-case design widely, Seiko developed the "grammar of design”, initially most visible in the high-end Grand Seiko and King Seiko models of the late 1960s. The impetus was the same – to develop a bold new eye-catching aesthetic in which the watch case was designed as an integrated single form rather than as a set of connected, discordant parts. But while the Swiss looked towards spheroid, slightly organic forms in line with the fashion trends of the period, Seiko seem to have taken inspiration from a fusion of very traditional Japanese simplicity of line and curvature – almost calligraphy – and the faceted metallic shapes of space-age satellites and landing modules. As our period progressed we saw instances of the Swiss and the Japanese borrowing these respective forms from each other (Swiss watches were imported into Japan in large numbers, while Japanese watches became well-known in Europe and North America, causing some homogenisation of design trends) but their origins were grounded in fundamentally different cultural perspectives.
This website is my personal dedication to the moonage watches based on my own particular collecting obsessions. Part of my reason for creating it was a frustration with the way that the evolving online media environment is increasingly dominated by ugly and often grossly oversized new watches, marketed and discussed with reference only to the most unsubtle aspects of external appearance and trivial dimensions of function (such as power reserve). Meanwhile, the less prominent vintage watch media sphere mostly caters to collectors of stupendously expensive auction pieces from a few favoured brands, and is increasingly concerned with fashion trends surrounding particular models and styles. Social media platforms such as Instagram provide interaction space for the wider world of vintage watches, but by their nature are intentionally designed to discourage in-depth analysis. Meanwhile, in the remaining traditional online forums, all of these disparate cultures clash - constructively in the best forums but violently in the worst, as informed and nuanced content is frequently buried and occasionally trolled by the resentfully uninterested (WatchUSeek seems to be particularly prone to this).
This space is where I collect my own subjective ideas and observations on watches. I don't necessarily expect it to be of interest to anyone else, but if it is I'd be happy to talk about it. If it isn't, please don't feel you need to tell me.. ;-)
