This Hot New Watch Brand Is Reviving '60s-Era Rolex Vibes

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In all my years covering watches, I’ve rarely felt bowled over by something brand new. The watch world is obsessed with its own history, which is constantly being revived and rewritten for profit. Many of the most prominent brands are principally concerned with churning out minor variations on iconic models rather than trying to canonize wholly new designs. Well, picture me on my butt thanks to a new brand, Toledano & Chan, and its debut watch the B/1. Here are 20 things I find compelling about this fresh-faced release and the startup outfit behind it.

1. The B/1 comes from a watch-world celeb. The brand’s founders are Alfred Chan and Phillip Toledano. You might recognize the latter name, who is better known as @misterenthusiast. “I might legally change my name to it, including the @ sign,” he joked in a 2020 interview with A Collected Man. Toledano is not just a super collector with supreme taste, but also a recurring character in the cinematic universe of Mike Nouveau, the king of WatchTok. If this were the MNCU, Toledano would be like Ant-Man, a heavyweight who’s essential for comedic relief.

2. Toledano and Chan launched the brand without ever meeting IRL. How’s this for a 21st-century success story? Toledano and Chan started this project in 2021, while the pandemic was raging, and they still haven’t met in person. “I've been working with a Russian bot all these years,” Toledano joked over a video call Wednesday.

3. Toledano’s signature bit of slang is “geezer.” It’s charming. Because British.

4. The watch is unlike any other (modern) piece on the market. The watch’s blocky, asymmetrical head looks like a Piaget Polo with an alarming outgrowth on one side.

5. The inspiration for the B/1’s shape is incredibly specific. Seeking out design influences, Toledano emptied the cupboard of potential ingredients. He gravitated toward the Breuer Building, the former home of the Whitney Museum, in New York City. “I used to go to the Breuer a lot when it was the Whitney, because it was kind of the perfect-sized museum,” Toledano said. “But more than that, I was always mesmerized by the exterior.” The watch essentially takes its exact shape from the Breuer’s asymmetrical windows.

6. Window-inspired watches. So hot right now. “Is that not going to sell a shitload of watches?” Toledano said with a laugh, after informing me of the watch’s architectural inspo.. “Everyone wants a window as a watch.” He was kidding, but don’t count out the humble window! Gérald Genta famously referenced ship portholes while designing a watch that perhaps you’ve heard of: Patek Philippe’s iconic Nautilus.

7. There’s some real poetry in the B/1’s main taking inspiration from this particular window. The Breuer Building’s oddly shaped windows serve a specific purpose. According to Toledano, they were designed to “not let much light in so the art wouldn't be ruined.”. And what is a watch if not a piece of art meant to be maintained and loved over many generations?

8. Rolex’s King Midas also featured heavily on Toledano and Chan’s mood board. The hype behind the dressy, ’60s-era Rolex oddball has been fermenting for years. Now, we get a modern interpretation.

9. There are a lot of Rolex-inspired pieces, but few nod to the King Midas. Most new brands are intent on reinventing Rolex’s stalwart sport watches, but we have enough affordable spins on the Submariner and GMT. “There’s a whole era of design language that [has been] abandoned and was so interesting,” Toledano said.

10. Toledano and Chan even put the B/1’s crown on the left—making it a destro—as “a little nod to the Midas,” Toledano said.

11. “No one's ever really taken up the design language of the ’70s integrated bracelet watches and iterated and expanded on that idea,” Toledano said. While watches with integrated bracelets like the Nautilus and Audemars Piguet Royal Oak are constantly picked over for inspiration, Toledano points to pieces like the Piaget Polo that have a seamless design from bracelet to watch. While the B/1 is less uniform than the Piaget, it maintains its straight lines and brutalist edges throughout.

12. Seriously—take a closer look. The bracelet links, the right edge of the watch’s head, and even the hour hand on the B/1 continue the ramped-up shape that peaks before dramatically sloping back down.

13. The hour hand looks like a Broken Goron Sword. (From the greatest video game ever made.)

14. The disco-ready lapis dial. Stone dials are all over my Instagram feed, and navy lapis was an especially popular choice on many watches from the ’70s.

15. And the B/1 is like my fiancée’s famous ancestor Donald Dinnie: They can both carry the hell out of a stone. “We actually tried a bunch of other [stones],” Toledano said. “Mother of pearl, meteorite, tiger’s eye. Some of those may appear magically in later iterations of the watch.”

16. Toledano and Chan couldn’t have predicted this, but this watch is landing at the perfect time. The summer of 2021 was the absolute zenith of steel sport watches: prices on the Rolex Daytona, Nautilus, and Royal Oak had all reached their unsustainable and volcanic peaks. It was in this environment that Toledano and Chan designed to launch an artsy watch indebted to the King Midas. “It's total luck,” Toledano said. “What's amazing about the last year is the watch world has opened up like a bloody orchid to the whole landscape—we can have different shaped watches, smaller watches, exotic stone dials, and interesting architectural shapes. That makes me happy on a personal level, because I've been obsessed with ‘70s watches for a while, but it's also incredibly fortuitous for our brand.” Toledano admits to feeling: “Holy shit, we were saved by time.”

17. Before it was produced in steel, the B/1 was modeled in clay and 3D-printed. To help visualize the watch, Toledano made models of it out of actual clay before moving on to slightly more advanced 3D-printed versions.

18. The box maintains the brutalist theme. Toledano calls it “the concrete sarcophagus.” These boxes, which also mirror the Breuer Building windows, were molded by hand. “That's the exciting thing about having a brand,” Toledano said. “You can consider all aspects of what you touch and make it creative or not.”

19. Toledano and Chan kept us neurotic freaks in mind. When I asked whether or not they considered a recessed crown to keep the straight edge, Toledano said they did but it was too “fiddly.” Fiddly is a death sentence for a new watch. ”We knew if it were fiddly, we'd be besieged by enraged emails about how fiddly it was.”

20. The Toledano & Chan B/1 is available for $4,000 on May 16 at 9 a.m. EST. You can buy it through the brand’s website or the Hodinkee shop.

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Originally Appeared on GQ