Issue 197: Style And Substance? Thoughts On The New Omega Constellation
How should practicality and elegance co-exist, or put another way: what happens when tool watch brands make dress watches
Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that must apologise profusely for the lack of a podcast this week. It has been a busy time, and next week is set to be even worse, so I shall make no promises about its return other than to say it pains me not to put it out there and I won’t let it slip for long.
For reasons that will become clear in due course I have been deeply immersed in Omega history of late, so the announcement of a new Constellation came at a good time. I have purposefully avoided reading too many hot takes before publishing this; part of me suspects that it will incite the usual remarks about size and price - and fair’s fair, those aren’t aspects I felt able to ignore either - but I also thought there was scope to say something a bit more considered about how it fits into the Great Dress Watch Renaissance we’ve been experiencing, and what that even really looks like. I hope you enjoy it.
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Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:
A galaxy full of stars
Omega’s new Observatory Constellation, which launched yesterday, March 26th, posed a few interesting questions for me.
If you aren’t yet aware, the key point — aside from the return of the Constellation’s 1950s design language which is significant in itself — was the introduction of a new testing system which allowed a two-hand watch to be certified as a Master Chronometer.
Previously, the METAS testing processes relied on photography of the watch’s second hand to assess its daily rate variation, or accuracy for short. That is evidently impossible with a two-hand dress watch, but Omega doesn’t want to release anything that doesn’t meet METAS standards if it can help it, least of all a watch descended from (or at least named in honour of) a celebrated observatory champion. So it developed an acoustic testing system that listens to the oscillation of a watch throughout its entire 25-day testing period, and calculates not only the existence and scale of any deviation but its precise occurrence. This already seems like a significant improvement in the methodology - perhaps analogous with having an echocardiogram (ECG) and being on continuous heart-rate monitoring.
The new system raises a few other tangential questions — I have asked Omega how it works and what its limitations might be, for example with regard to background noise and what volume of watches can be tested in parallel, as well as whether it intends to introduce this standard for all METAS testing, not just on these watches — but for now it gave me the following broader musings:
How many other brands are combining dress watchmaking with precision? How does Omega’s effort to deliver both style and substance stack up - on both counts? And perhaps the most fundamental question of all: does anyone care about having an accurate dress watch?
