Window-shopping (literally or figuratively) is a pastime for watch enthusiasts the world over. For those of us on the tighter end of the budget scale, price tags in the tens of thousands won’t stop us spending hours ogling press photos and poring over spec sheets. The challenge of ever-tightening allocations means even those for whom money is no object might have to content themselves with the above for several years until they can get their hands on the watch they have their heart set on.
I say this because I love the Speedmaster, but for years I’ve wanted the classic Moonwatch with a white dial. (If you think I’m using creative licence here, just check my watch-nerd WhatsApp group. Yes, I’m in a watch-nerd WhatsApp group.) My problem has always been that the closest thing Omega offered to the spec I was after is built from platinum and comes with an RRP of £52,400.
That is, until now. Teased last November on the wrist of Daniel Craig, the brand’s newest release has just landed. And, in an instant classic of the ‘watch brand listens to its fans’ genre, it takes the familiar black dial of the much-loved Moonwatch and inverts it to pristine, clean, polar white (with just a dash of red).
I won’t do too much scene-setting here, but the classic Moonwatch is a hall-of-famer. The Speedmaster chronograph was originally created in the 1957, but the variant that became the Moonwatch was on the wrists of NASA’s astronauts who landed on the moon on the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, something that unsurprisingly catapulted it into ‘genuinely iconic’ territory.
Nowadays, you’ll find variations of the Speedmaster across both racing and space-exploration themes, with the classic black-dialled, manual-winding Moonwatch variant a grail watch for many available in both hesalite and sapphire crystal with a closed and open caseback respectively.
But it was more than just me crying out for a white-dialled version (like most, I consider the cult-classic Snoopy Moonwatch, with a white dial and navy bezel, to be in a different conversation, and the same for the all-white ‘White Side of the Moon’).
And this new, more polar 42mm variant is, pleasingly, pretty much exactly the same spec as the 42mm sapphire Moonwatch – from the beautiful jubilee-style polished bracelet to the exhibition caseback, sumptuous Calibre 3861 manual-winding movement, black tachymeter bezel, recessed chronograph subdials, thickness and lug-to-lug sizing, and more or less the same RRP – so aside from the addition of two options on straps, this really is a simple question of aesthetics.
The inspiration for the polar-white dial is described as both the white of astronauts’ suits and also – in the case of its subtle red motifs on the Speedmaster logo and second hand – the oft-forgotten Alaska I project of the late 1960s, whose modern iteration still exists today.
More than that, though, I’m sure the impetus came as much from fans desperate for the obvious counterpart to the classic black dial. Omega has given us something obvious but, in my opinion, designed to absolute perfection, and which now sits right in Omega’s core range (for now with a waiting list, but not a limited edition, and with strap options as well as the bracelet).
The happy result for me personally, as someone it’s safe to say will almost certainly never own a platinum watch, is that it shaves almost £45,000 off the asking price for a model I like much more. For me, it’s one of the best iterations since the original, and my instant new favourite Speedmaster – showing you don’t have to reinvent the wheel (or the rocket?) to launch something genuinely exceptional.
From £7,300; omegawatches.com
