Don't miss the next drop
DE VILLE sits by itself on the lower half of this dial, with no Seamaster anywhere above it. The name was Norman Morris’s idea: Omega’s agent in New York wanted the slimmer, dressier Seamasters of 1960 to stand apart from the rest of the range. Morris had been the sole American distributor of Omega since the early 1930s, and from 1963 the full name appeared on the dial.
De Ville is French for “of the town.” For its first years the word shared the dial with Seamaster, until Omega dropped the older name in 1967 and gave De Ville a catalog page of its own. This Omega 166.053 belongs to the independent line in its early years, and its movement serial, 29471159, dates it to about 1969 or 1970.
The dial furniture is built from squares. Each hour marker is applied as a small black center inside a gold-tone frame, and the hour and minute hands carry narrow black inlays to match, so markers and hands read as one set. Against the champagne surface the black gives the time a crisper edge than plain batons would. Up close, the hands and marker frames have picked up some dark spotting.
At three o’clock a framed window shows both the day and the date. Caliber 752 drives it, a 24-jewel automatic that winds itself on the wrist. The day disc reads FRE, short for Freitag, so this De Ville speaks German on Fridays at least.
The case is just as plain about its gold. PLAQUE OR G and 20 MICRONS are stamped inside, and the exterior of the caseback repeats the point in English: GOLD ELECTROPLATED. On a Swiss case the micron figure gives the thickness of the gold, so this one carries two hundredths of a millimeter of it over the base metal, the usual coat for plated Omegas of the period. Half a century has found its limits: the plating has worn through at the underside corners, and the back carries dense fine scratches.
The cushion case measures 36mm across, with a signed Omega crown and a raised crystal, and it now rides on a forest green suede strap that draws out the warmth of the champagne dial. Under that crystal, the name Morris asked Omega to print still stands alone.
