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Longines holds one of the most distinguished resumes in Swiss watchmaking. Founded in Saint-Imier in 1832, the firm racked up ten World’s Fair Grand Prix awards and earned a reputation for in-house movements that, in our opinion, stand shoulder to shoulder with the very best of the period. By the mid-1950s, Longines was producing some of the finest dress watches in the world, and many collectors today rightly regard the brand’s caliber 9L family as the equal of the IWC 89 or Hamilton 982M. There is real pedigree under the hood here.
This particular example is a Reference 2049, a wonderful expression of the “hourglass” or fancy lug case style that defined Longines’s American distributed dress watches in the late 1940s and into the 1950s. The case was produced by the Star Watch Case Company for Longines-Wittnauer Watch Co. Inc., the New York based distributor that served the North American market through this period, and it is finished in 10K gold filled. The shape is genuinely sculptural, with sharply chamfered lugs that flare outward at the corners and a concave caseback profile that pinches in at the wrist. Photographs honestly do not do it justice. Caseback markings are crisp and intact, reading “Longines-Wittnauer Watch Co. Inc., New York, Geneva, Montreal,” with the Star W.C. Co. mark, “10K Gold Filled,” reference 2049, and the case serial 241587 visible upon opening.
Inside ticks the manual wind caliber 9LT, the 17 jewel rectangular workhorse that Longines relied on for its small format dress watches throughout the 1940s and 1950s. The movement runs at 18,000 vibrations per hour with a 43 hour power reserve, and is signed in copper toned gilt with the boxed “9LT” cartouche, “Longines Watch Co. Swiss, Seventeen 17 Jewels, Unadjusted,” and the LXW stamp confirming its destination for Longines-Wittnauer. The frosted finishing on the bridges and the warm gilt accents around the jewel chatons are exactly what we look for in a vintage Longines of this calibre.
The dial is fully original and has aged beautifully. The silver finish has developed a soft, evenly distributed spotting that reads as a warm ivory tone in person, the kind of honest aging that we believe gives mid-century watches their soul. Applied faceted gilt dart indices mark the hours, with gilded Arabic 12 and 6 anchoring the layout vertically. A small seconds subdial sits at six o’clock with a printed minute track and “Swiss” at the bottom edge. The Longines wordmark and winged hourglass logo sit applied in gilt at twelve, and the gilded dauphine hands themselves carry a light, even patina that ties the whole composition together. A tall domed acrylic crystal sits proud above the dial, magnifying every detail.
We have paired the Reference 2049 with our sky blue leather strap, finished with contrast white stitching. The cool blue plays beautifully off the warm gilt dial elements and the gold filled case, and lends this otherwise formal piece an unexpected, sporting energy that we genuinely love. To us, this is the kind of mid-century Longines that does everything we ask of a vintage dress watch: it has architectural presence on the wrist, an in-house movement with serious pedigree, and a dial that has aged exactly as nature and time intended.
