[Video] The Rado Anatom, and What the Next Vintage Watch Revival Might Look Like

When you write about watches for a living, it’s impossible not to think about the concept of vintage reissues and vintage inspired watches on an almost daily basis. For the last ten years, at least, vintage inspired watches have been the key driving force in the watch market, even if you take a somewhat narrow view of what a “vintage inspired” watch really is. They have been ubiquitous for a long time now. 

But that’s changing. We no longer live in an environment where every other watch that finds its way into my inbox is based on a design from the middle of the last century. They’re still there, to be sure, but it’s not nearly as overwhelming as it once was. It’s been gratifying to see many brands, a lot of them small and making watches at affordable price points, introduce popular contemporary designs that are original and have resonated strongly with the community. By the same token, the best makers of watches inspired by designs from the 1950s and 1960s have established themselves more firmly, and carved out niches for themselves in the enthusiast community where their watches don’t feel like knock-offs, but part of a long tradition, and possessed of their own unique design language. 

It occurs to me though that my perspective on this could simply be that of someone who is getting older. I’ve rounded 40 now, and am shocked on a weekly basis to learn that albums and movies that meant a lot to me in high school and college are now celebrating 20 and 25 year anniversaries. We might just be heading into an era where “vintage inspired” simply means something more recent. The 1970s have been fairly well plumbed, but there’s still plenty of meat on the 1980s bone, and I wonder if we’re heading for a period where nostalgia for the Greed Decade could influence the watch industry in a way it hasn’t before. 

I blame the Rado Anatom for this. When the watch was announced back in December of last year, I immediately dashed off an email asking for a sample. Something about it was immediately aesthetically interesting to me. It felt like a relic from the earliest time I could remember, and indeed the Anatom’s recent reissue is a celebration of its 40th anniversary. I don’t remember the Anatom specifically from my youth or anything like that, but the color, shape, and use of materials feels distinctly 1980s in a way that I really enjoy. 

The watch itself is very nice. Both vintage and these new modern Anatoms have a dramatically curved case and crystal that makes for a pleasingly tight and sleek feeling on the wrist. Rado is known for their use of ceramic, and while the Anatom doesn’t have a full ceramic case, the top portion (the most visually prominent) is ceramic, with the mid case crafted from steel that has been given a DLC treatment. The dial is blue with a smoked effect at the edges that I really like. The delta between brightness at the center and darkness at the edge is more substantial here than most watches with similar fumé effects. 

And I have to give a special shout out to the rubber strap, which is probably among the most comfortable I’ve tried recently. It fits flush to the case for an integrated look, and has a ribbed design that visually complements the shape of the case. It’s just a very coherent design – you can tell that getting the strap exactly right was important to Rado when they were piecing this together, and never an afterthought. 

But what’s really interesting to me about the Anatom isn’t the watch itself, even though I like it quite a bit. It’s the prospect of watches from the 80s (or even the 90s) being the subjects of the next phase of vintage inspired design. Are we as a watch community (and a sub-community of aging millennials) ready for this? 

Personally, I think I am. As I’ve gotten older, I feel like I better understand the environment I grew up in, which is to say, an environment completely dominated by Baby Boomers and their obsession with the 1960s. In the 1990s, we saw a glut of media looking back thirty or so years to the 60s, when the Boomers, our parents, were young, free, and completely unencumbered by mortgages and a 9-5 lifestyle. My favorite example of this particular flavor of nostalgia is to look at the films of Oliver Stone through the mid-80s to the 90s: Platoon, Born on the 4th of July, The Doors, JFK. This is the work of a man compulsively looking back, and it mirrors other pieces of Boomer nostalgia from the time period in everything from The Wonder Years to The Beatles Anthology. 

The trend of vintage inspired watches doesn’t line up with this type of nostalgia exactly (if it did, the Black Bay would have been the watch of the 1990s) but I think there’s reason to believe that as tastes evolve in the watch community, we might see a more pronounced look back on the 80s and 90s. It stands to reason, I think, that as a new generation of top level decision makers take the reins at big Swiss brands, when they decide to look back on something, they’ll pull from a past that is familiar to them. That’s going to be the 1980s and 90s in many cases. I don’t know who the Oliver Stone-like figure in the watch industry might turn out to be, but it’s not out of the question that as millennials age, have more disposable income, and simultaneously take on a greater level of creative control, the vintage inspired watches of the not too distant future will look very different from those of the recent past. 

To be clear, I don’t think that the vintage inspired watches we’ve come to know over the course of the last decade are going anywhere anytime soon. These watches are popular because the designs are basically timeless. You wouldn’t hear much of an argument from me if you claimed that the dive watch, at a basic level, was perfected in the 1960s. There’s no real need to reinvent something that is so profoundly unbroken. But we’re at a point where you can’t really do much more when it comes to pulling from those midcentury design codes. It feels like just about every permutation has been tried, and enthusiasts can get almost anything they want in this genre, from direct 1:1 recreations to reinterpretations that tweak things in any number of ways. 

Moving on, collectively, to another period seems inevitable, and I’m curious how watch designers and brands handle iconic watches and design tropes from an era that is not looked upon as fondly, historically, by collectors. The 1980s and 90s have often been a punchline in serious collector circles, but I think there are gems to explore and plenty of cool ideas to mine. If two-tone really is on its way back (something that has been threatened for years without a whole lot of substance) the 80s feels like the right playing field to reinterpret or expand on those ideas. We’ve also seen a shift in interest recently toward smaller, dressier watches that are often a lot flashier than the tool watches of the 1960s that have served as reliable inspiration for years. If stone dials and cocktail watches are the new generic black dialed divers, we could be in for a really fun period of invention.