Don't miss the next drop
The dial of this Movado triple calendar carries one name. TIFFANY & CO. sits in small serif capitals below twelve, with no maker’s signature under it and nothing else on the face but SWISS MADE at the outer edge. To learn who actually built the watch we have to turn it over, where the caseback reads MOVADO FACTORIES SWITZERLAND around its lower edge. Movado made it, then stepped back and let Fifth Avenue have the front.
The movement is stamped 15 FIFTEEN JEWELS, UNADJUSTED, SWISS, and that English was not written for the customer. It is customs paperwork. Paragraph 367 of the US Tariff Act of 1930 taxed imported watch movements by the jewels they carried and the adjustments their makers declared, fifteen cents for every jewel past the seventh and a dollar for every adjustment, with temperature counted as two. The same paragraph dictated how to say it: the jewel count cut into the plate in words and in Arabic numerals, and, where no adjustments were claimed, the single word unadjusted. Duty was assessed on what the stamp said rather than on what the watch did, and a movement that reached the border marked any other way was refused entry. The result is a Swiss watch that speaks American on the inside.
Tiffany opened its Fifth Avenue store at 57th Street in 1940, and dials like this one are how the firm sold Swiss watches: its own name on the front, the maker’s left to the caseback. The Movado triple calendar ran from 1938 to about 1954, and this one reads day, date and month off a hand-wound movement with no annual-calendar cleverness in it. Every month that came up short of thirty-one days had to be put right by hand, which is what the two correctors set above and below the crown are for.
The case is 33mm of stainless steel, round, with a stepped bezel, straight faceted lugs and a snap back sitting over an inner dust cover. The dial has gone eggshell, mottled and warm toward its edges, painted with black Arabic numerals and a red fifth-of-a-second track around the outside. Day shows at nine, month at three, and the date is read off the outer chapter by a blued pointer tipped in red. The hour and minute hands have oxidised to a soft brown, the caseback is hairlined all over from decades of cuff, and none of it has been tidied up. Inside are fifteen jewels from the 470 family that carried Movado’s calendar work.
Serviced in-house at OTTUHR and backed by our 2-year mechanical warranty, on a black leather strap. The front of this watch says Tiffany. We rather like that the back still has to tell the truth to a customs officer.
