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HOROLOVOX

@horolovox

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Sharing my unusual vintage watches & other peculiar horological thingamajigs that float my boat. - My book: 'Retro Watches' & my brand: @xericwatches

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Just arrived: my first Sicura Sicatron Electronic, a nearly unused Swiss watch from the early 1970s. Battery-powered, but with a mechanical balance wheel keeping time—a little of the old world and a little of the new, as quartz was turning watchmaking upside down. Pretty cool to find one this well preserved.

Bear with me while I get used to being on camera! Figured I’d share the excitement of opening this one with you. Know more about these than I do? I’d love to hear it. #sicura #sicurasicatron #electronicwatch #vintagesicura #vintagewatch by @horolovox

Part 1 (of many)- personal collection highlights from my book, Retro Watches. Rare models ranging here from Zenith, Favre Leuba, Omega, Lip, Hamilton - & many other obscure beauties and beasts from Sultana, Desotos, Sicura and more. Order the new paperback on Amazon. #retrowatchesbook #watchcollection #watchcollector #vintagewatch #vintagewatch - NOT FOR SALE - sorry for crappy video. by @horolovox

It’s been nearly 20 years since I did this video for @coolhunting under my former moniker, Watchismo. So much has changed, so much has stayed the same. #watchismo #coolhunting #xericwatches by @horolovox

I usually find slow wrist rolls a little painful. All that anticipation should reveal something worth waiting for. This one earns it.

My newest acquisition: a nearly unused Sicura Sicatron Electronic from the early 1970s. Those hooded lugs, with their racing slots, deserve a little time in motion along with the original racing strap. Somewhere between the vents of an Italian concept car and a UFO that’s just landed on your wrist. Turn it a little further and there’s another detail.

The technology inside is just as much a product of its moment. It’s electromechanical: a battery and electronic circuit keep a traditional balance wheel moving, while the balance and hairspring still keep time. No winding required, but plenty of mechanical life inside.

This was an era when the future of watchmaking was being contested. Quartz was emerging, electronic watches were arriving from Japan and America, and the Swiss were exploring several paths of their own. The Sicatron captures one of those paths: bringing electronics into a watch without abandoning its mechanical timekeeper. #sicura #sicatron #sicurasicatron #vintagesicura #sicurawatch by @horolovox

Part 11: Hamilton, Vulcain, Omega, Enicar, Sorna, Mido, Zodiac, Zenith, Kienzle, Yema, Mondia, Longines and several others are represented here through some of their stranger, and less easily categorized designs. Mechanical digitals, jump hours, mystery watches, chronographs, driver’s watches, asymmetric & early plastic cases and all sorts of experiments that seemed worth holding onto.

Some are truly special pieces, some are simply interesting, and a few may be here because I have never quite known what else to do with them. Together, they make up the odds and ends of the collection—a wide-ranging assortment of watches that caught my attention for one reason or another and still manage to hold it. #retrowatchesbook #vintagewatch #vintagewatches #watchcollector #watchcollection by @horolovox

Part 10: The extraordinary designer watches created for LIP in France during a brief burst of experimentation from the turn of the 1970s through the middle of the decade. At a moment when the historic Besançon manufacturer was reinventing itself, LIP looked beyond the traditional watch industry and invited outsiders to reconsider the wristwatch from scratch. Roger Tallon was one of France’s great industrial designers; Isabelle Hebey was an acclaimed interior architect; Marc Held and Michel Boyer moved between architecture, interiors and furniture; Rudi Meyer came from graphic design and typography; Jean Dinh Van approached objects as a sculptor and jeweler; while François de Baschmakoff and Michel Kinn brought their own radical ideas about form, color and displaying time. Together they produced watches that were ergonomic, architectural, graphic, playful and sometimes wonderfully impractical.

Nothing quite like this happened before or afterward—so many important creative voices converging on one French watch company within just a few years. These examples are among the nearly new-old-stock pieces in my collection, many apparently unworn and preserved almost exactly as they left the factory half a century ago. They are spread throughout these collections—or perhaps more accurately, these reliquaries—alongside many other LIP watches I have gathered over the years. To me, they represent the quintessential designer-watch collection: not watch designers following accepted rules, but architects, industrial designers, interior designers, graphic artists and jewelers asking what a watch could become if there were no rules. Many more varieties of LIP are spaced out throughout this series. Sorry, none of for sale. #vintagewatch #vintagewatches #retrowatchesbook #lipwatches #vintagelipwatch by @horolovox

Part 9: My prized collection of vintage Pierre Cardin Espace watches from 1971–72. I first discovered them in Pieter Doensen’s long out-of-print book, “Watch: History of the Modern Wristwatch” —written in Utrecht and still my personal watch bible. Seeing those pages changed the way I looked at watches. Here was an entire PC collection that abandoned nearly every convention: metal blocks, Lucite forms, smoky crystals, layered discs, sculptural curves and radically asymmetric cases. The series included 26 designs and variations created for Jaeger in Paris, combining serious mechanical watchmaking with the full force of Cardin’s Space Age vision.

These were not ordinary fashion watches with a designer’s name added to the dial. They were complete design objects—strange, wearable pieces of brutalist architecture that still look as though they arrived from an alternate future. Discovering them became enormously important to me as a collector and later as a designer. They helped confirm that a watch could be more than a traditional round case and familiar dial; it could be provocative, humorous, sculptural and completely unexpected. In many ways, this collection and many of the others helped establish the visual language I have continued exploring to this day at @xericwatches by @horolovox

Part 8: The Spaceman watches of the late 1960s and early 1970s were among the first vintage watches that completely pulled me in. Designed by André LeMarquand to commemorate humanity’s journey to the moon, they looked less like conventional watches and more like props from an imagined future—bold, strange, sculptural and unlike anything else being worn at the time or since.

My fascination went far beyond collecting. In 1998, I traveled to Switzerland and tracked down a cache of unused new-old-stock Spaceman watches from the original manufacturer in Basel. That discovery became part of the origin story for Watchismo, the name I used for years to share my obsession with unconventional vintage watch design of the sixties and seventies. The same spirit now continues through @Horolovox and @XericWatches : a lifelong journey for watches that challenge expectations, tell a larger story and make time feel unique again. #retrowatchesbook #spacemanwatch #spacemanwatches #watchescollection #watchcollector by @horolovox

Part 7: These vintage digital watches come from a brief, extraordinary moment when the wrist became a testing ground for the future. Glowing LED numerals, early liquid-crystal displays, dynamic-scattering screens, field-effect LCDs and other short-lived solutions appeared in rapid succession—each promising a clearer, thinner and more efficient way to tell time. Some lit up only at the push of a button; others remained continuously visible by using ambient light instead of producing their own. Technology was advancing so quickly that a watch could feel revolutionary when introduced and nearly obsolete soon afterward.

They aren’t merely digital watches; they’re surviving experiments from a compressed period of invention, when engineers were still figuring out what an electronic watch should look like and how it should behave. Most of these work btw! NFS not for sale #vintageledwatch #vintagewatch #watchcollector #watchcollection #watchcollecting watches shown are from Girard Perregaux, Lip, Bulova, Heuer, Yema, Quartzmatic, Sicura, Mido, Benrus and More. by @horolovox

Part 6: The collection gets even more eclectic ranging from unusual vintage Rolex, JLC, Enicar, Sandoz, Sorna, Rado, Hamilton, Vulcain, and more. #vintagewatch #vintagewatches #watchcollecting #watchcollector #watchcollection by @horolovox

Part 5: More unusual vintage watch designs from Jaeger LeCoultre, Gubelin, Junghans, Tissot, Lip and Seiko. As well as long gone vintage microbrands from the sixties and seventies, Dugena, Itraco, Kienzle, Derby, Mondia and more. Any questions, feel free to post them. Just don’t ask if they are for sale, they are Not #vintagewatch #vintagewatches #watchescollection #watchcollector #watchcollecting by @horolovox