Some watch collections get nudged forward through careful evolutions unnoticed to even a trained eye. But every so often, one gets rethought from the ground up, enter the Longines Master Collection. With traditional good looks, the Master Collection has been a cornerstone of the brand since 2005, and has just had a complete redesign.
The broad collection spans three-hand models, moonphase chronographs, and, for the first time in the collection’s history, a monopusher chronograph. With the new Master Collection, Longines is not reinventing the wheel, importantly as it is the collection with the richest clues from the brand’s legacy. But the design language is cleaner, the cases reworked with a concave bezel, and each dial opened up for a more legible, contemporary read.
The traditional elegance is intact, but the execution is sharper, coming through strongly in the Master Collection’s halo piece, the new Chrono Monopusher. Even an untrained eye will notice the lack of stop and start pushers framing the crown, and this is a genuine event. Where a normal chronograph uses two pushers to start, stop and reset the stopwatch function, this one does all three through a single pusher integrated into the crown. It’s a mechanically elegant solution that also happens to be intuitive to use, and it revives a piece of real Longines history. The brand built one of the first wrist-worn monopusher chronographs back in 1911.
Housed in a 41mm steel case and powered by the column-wheel calibre L799.5 with 68 hours of reserve, it comes with a pulsometer scale on the outer dial, the old doctor’s tool for reading a heartbeat, in silver opaline or a frosted blue barleycorn finish, both with a distinct guilloché centre, fitted with matching leather straps.
Also shown in the new collection is the Chrono Moonphase, the most complicated watch in the refreshed lineup, with a complex yet legible dial accentuated by an evocative moonphase at six o’clock. At the heart of the Chrono Moonphase is the self-winding L687.5 movement, boasting a full calendar, day, date, month, 24-hour indication and a moonphase accurate enough to become a talking point. Longines’ design team has given the new moonphase complication the crisp silver-white dial it deserves, also here featuring barleycorn guilloché, the traditional pop of blued steel hands and nine applied Arabic numerals keep it readable rather than busy. This is the trick with a watch doing this much, and reading the calendar on a dial steeped in Swiss legacy will give the digitally-inclined watch debutants out there a calm sense of timeless mechanical wonder.
Within the new Longines Master Collection also sits a series of new three-hand models, the quiet heart of the collection. This is where the redesign by the Swiss brand is felt most broadly, in a spread of sizes from 30 to 41mm, including new fresh blue guilloché dial executions, two-tone bracelets, mother-of-pearl and diamond options at the smaller end. These are understated, everyday timepieces where everything is considered, from the reworked guilloché patterns to the oscillating rotor visible through the sapphire case backs that echo the bezel colour on the two-tone pieces. These models are the most versatile pieces in the range and, for many, will offer a tempting entry ticket to mechanical watchmaking.
