It’s not every day that I see a piece that truly surprises and this new Oris Full Steel, based on a 1990s design, fits that bill.
Designed to celebrate Oris’ birthday, the Full Steel Holstein has a unique world-timer movement with two buttons at the bottom of the case to advance and retreat the hours hand. A second timezone at three o’clock shows you home time.
You can check out the product page here.
From the release:
The watch celebrating our 118th birthday is inspired by the Full Steel Worldtimer, a stainless steel sports watch introduced in 1998 that picked up on an extraordinary movement Oris had debuted a year before.
Known as the Worldtimer, Oris Calibre 690 was a world first. Using plus and minus buttons on the case flanks, it could adjust local time in one-hour jumps either forwards or backwards, with home time shown on a counter at 3 o’clock. Even more impressively, as the time moved past midnight in either direction, the date would change, too.
The late 1990s was an exciting time for Oris. The company was resurgent after the trials of the Quartz Crisis, which put hundreds of Swiss watchmaking companies out of business in the 1970s and 1980s, and was innovating new mechanical functions with real-world applications. The Full Steel Worldtimer was a landmark not just for Oris, but for Swiss watchmaking.
The piece will cost about $5,000 when it launches this month.
The original piece looks very similar to the new version with a few major aesthetic changes included a blockier design and bigger size. You can pick them up for about $1,500 these days so you might want to go used before you go new. That said, both are definitely on my “to acquire” list.
