Introducing: The Glashütte Original 2020 Sixties Edition In Glacier Blue

One doesn't generally associate the town of Glashütte in particular, and German watchmaking in general, with bright bursts of almost tropical-bird eye-catching color. You think (I do anyway) of a staid, grey landscape in which restrained watchmaking is carried on with an eye to precision born of centuries of practice. However, making delightfully colorful watches in an almost Pop-era idiom is exactly what Glashütte Original has been doing for several years in, not coincidentally, the company's Sixties collection. The Sixties collection takes as its starting point some of the more colorful and stylish watches produced in Glashütte in the 1960s. If you ever get a chance to visit the town (and it ought to be on any serious watch enthusiast's travel calendar) and see the German Watch Museum, which we visited in 2013, you can among other things see a display of pretty wild watchmaking from the GUB era. VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe was the state-owned watch company formed by the nationalization of the Glashütte watchmakers, and it became Glashütte Original after privatization in 1994.

Glashütte Original has been making some of its colorful Sixties watches in annual editions since 2018 – that is to say, production is limited to a single year. For 2020, the firm has introduced a new Sixties model and a new Sixties chronograph, with brilliantly colored "glacier blue" dials.

The glacier blue dial is made by Glashütte Original's own dial manufactory, which is located in Pforzheim – historically, a major center in Germany for both watchmaking and jewelry making. The process is a multistage effort: First, a sunray pattern is embossed on the dial, which is then pressed into its domed shape. Two separate coats of lacquer are applied – the first is a darker blue, followed by the "glacier blue" layer. This two-step process gives the dial its color gradient. Finally, the 1960s-era numerals and dial markers are incised.

The Sixties 2020 Annual Edition with glacier blue dial.

The effect is very beautiful. Round, time-only watches tend to fall into one of two camps. They either tend to err on the side of generic (which, to be fair, is a hard thing to avoid if all you have are a relatively few elements to play with). Or on the other hand, if they attempt to present a more distinctive face to the world, they can seem to be striving a bit more for effect than is good for them; after all, a watch intended to be worn every day should only go so far in calling attention to itself. Glashütte Original's Sixties models do a quite terrific job, I think, at being distinctive in design without taking things so far as to be going for novelty for its own sake. I have always felt that, at a very wrist-friendly 39mm x 9.4mm, the collection's time-only watches ought to be a bit more in our minds as representing a very attractive alternative if you are looking for a daily-wear watch.

While slightly larger, at 42mm x 12.4mm, the Sixties Chronograph shares much of the virtues of the basic Sixties model. It's a pretty unadorned affair and in certain respects seems, at least from a design standpoint, to have more in common with the world of mid-century, rather than modern chronographs.

This, I think, is hardly a disadvantage, however. The simplicity of the chronograph is of a kind with the straightforward but stylish design of the time-only model. In the metal and on the wrist – especially given the generous size of the subdials – I suspect that it would wear very well. One appreciates these watches as much for what they omit as for what they include – I am not doctrinaire about date windows, but I feel neither of these watches would have been improved by one, and one feels a sense of gratitude for the absence of extraneous verbiage on the dial as well.

Both watches are powered by variants on Glashütte Original's famous caliber 39 movement – the caliber 39-52, in the time-only model, and the caliber 39-47 in the case of the chronograph. (The chronograph is modular in construction.) The movement has an interesting history. The last automatic movement produced before GUB was privatized was the so-called Spezichron, which was brought out in 1978. During privatization, the company was owned between 1994 and 2000 by a Bavarian businessman named Heinz W. Pfeifer, and under his supervision, the Spezichron – which had, prior to his tenure, been updated to the caliber 10-30 – underwent such an extensive upgrade as to essentially become a completely new movement, with only 17 parts of the original 130 remaining unchanged. Though it receives relatively little attention from many enthusiasts, it remains an historically important part of the modern watchmaking landscape, one of the pioneering in-house calibers of the 1990s mechanical watchmaking renaissance.

Both watches are available now; price for the Sixties model is $6,700 and the Sixties Chronograph, $8,300.

The Glashütte Original Sixties 2020 Annual Edition: Case, stainless steel, 39mm x 9.4mm with domed sapphire crystal. Water resistance, 3 bar/30 meters. Dial, "glacier blue" with degradé effect, sunray brushed with incised numerals and markers. Movement, Glashütte Original in-house caliber 39-52, self-winding with 40-hour power reserve; frequency, 28,800 vph, with whiplash fine regulator. Price, $6,700.

The Glashütte Original Sixties Chronograph 2020 Annual Edition: Case, stainless steel, 42mm x 12.4mm, water resistance 3 bar/30 meters. Domed sapphire crystal. Dial, "glacier blue" with degradé effect, sunray brushed with incised numerals and markers. Movement, Glashütte Original in-house caliber 39-47, modular two-register chronograph with stop seconds, self-winding with 40-hour power reserve; frequency, 28,800 vph, with whiplash fine regulator. Price, $8,300.

See both the 2020 Annual Editions from Glashütte Original at Glashuette-Original.com.

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