Longines Gent's Watch, 1940s

Dealer description — Analog/Shift

Simplicity. So much of the modern watch world is confused. No iconic style, no cherished design language ever benefitted from addition. True style is spoken in simple direct tones, executed effortlessly in a cohesive voice. Longines has had it's fair share of pitfalls. Most of of the brand's offerings since the Quartz Revolution flunked; their design language was injected with artificial features that leaned more toward glitz and glam than style and function. Even today, the brand seems to tip-toe about the market, asking questions with their pieces instead of answering them. But the Longines of today is not the Longines of yesteryear. From the late 1800s, Longines was at the sharp end of the watchmaking spear. Constantly innovating, Longines was a company to be compared with the other major Swiss manufactures. By 1919, Longines was the official supplier of timepieces for the International Aeronautical Federation, working to develop highly accurate navigation chronometers for many of the era's great aviation pioneers. Most famous among Longines' forays into navigation pieces is probably the Lindberg Hour Angle watch, a wristwatch designed by Charles Lindberg in conjunction with the brand to allow aviators to calculate, with the help of a sextant and their latitude, their exact geographic location. (Don't ask us how, but word has it that Jack Forster over at HODINKEE has figured it out.) This piece, a simple time-only watch from the 1940s, is emblematic of Longines at full stride. The simple steel case houses a chipper Calibre 23M manually-winding movement with a running seconds sub-dial at 6:00 - a classic and lovely design complimented by the spartan dial with Arabic numerals at 12, 3, 6 and 9. Over all, this piece is a true benchmark of the simple, timeless styling mastered by Longines in its prime.