NEWS: A Steve McQueen Rolex Submariner ref. 5513 to be auctioned by Phillips
That’s right, a Rolex Submariner owned and gifted by the King of Cool will go under the hammer at Phillips auction house in New York on October 25. A year after the blockbuster sale of Paul Newman’s Paul Newman Daytona. It’s not just the timing of the sale that these two celebrity watches share either, with McQueen’s 1964 Rolex Submariner ref. 5513 sharing a similar story of provenance, complete with a few extra burning details. Phillips tell us the watch was purchased by McQueen in the 1960s. It was then gifted by him to his long-time stunt double Loren Janes, sometime in the mid-to-late ’70s, according to members of Janes’ surviving family. Having worked together on 19 of McQueen’s films over two decades, including Bullitt, The Great Escape and The Thomas Crown Affair, Janes was McQueen’s go-to stuntman, and before giving him the watch, McQueen had the case back inscribed: “LOREN, THE BEST DAMN STUNTMAN IN THE WORLD. STEVE.” Making this not only the earliest McQueen-owned Submariner ever put up for auction, but also the only known watch to bear the actor’s name. The story gets even more interesting. In 2016, a wildfire outside of Los Angeles, now known as the Sand Fire…
The post NEWS: A Steve McQueen Rolex Submariner ref. 5513 to be auctioned by Phillips appeared first on Time and Tide Watches.
It’s easy with any brand’s new release catalogue to get swept up with the drama and complexity of the halo pieces. In the case of Glashütte Original that glory goes to the flashy green of the Sixties Panorama Date, or the bells and whistles of the Senator Cosmopolite. But sometimes you crave something simple, clean and pure. That’s where this latest take on the Senator Excellence Panorama Date comes in. If you’re not au fait with the watch, it’s one of the less complex models in the Senator family and was first introduced, with its lunar sibling, back in 2016. A well-sized 42mm by 12.2mm watch, cased here in sensible and utilitarian steel, it’s powered by the calibre 36-03, a big date-equipped take on the very impressive Calibre 36. This is one very impressive movement, a 4Hz automatic, with 100 hours of power reserve (all coming from one barrel no less), and tested to standards that meaningfully exceed COSC standards. It also looks great too, what with that double ‘G’ skeletonised rotor. But for me, this watch is all about the dial. The design of the Senator Excellence Panorama Date is quite restrained to start with, with those arrowhead hour…
Editor’s note: You don’t have to be one of Gotham’s finest to figure out that the all new, all ‘Oystersteel’ ‘Pepsi’ GMT-Master II was one of the biggest releases to come out of Baselworld this year. The hype was real. And with all this talk of two-colour bezels, we got to wondering around the T+T office, if this one — the first of the Rolex ceramic bezels to get the bi-colour treatment — can hold its own against its brand-new red and blue younger sibling. While we wait for the first deliveries of Pepsi to be made, and to find out just how the Batman stacks up, we thought it was a good idea to get reacquainted with the BLNR, and Mr Bruce Duguay’s excellent in-depth review. When Rolex introduced the updated ceramic bezel GMT-Master II nearly 10 years ago it was perhaps one of the most aggressive revisions to this historic model. A beautiful new scratch and fade resistant ceramic insert for the bezel, a heftier case and more pronounced dial ushered in a new era for this pilot’s watch. Notably absent, however, were the bi-colour bezels that had been available since the inception of the GMT-Master in the 1950s (think ‘Pepsi’ blue/red and ‘Coke’ red/black).…