Don't miss the next drop
A double-signed dial usually enters the conversation attached to a Patek Philippe or a Rolex, the second name treated as a five-figure multiplier. This Omega makes the same move with far less noise. Beneath the Omega signature sits a second line, Tiffany & Co., printed at the center of the dial when the watch was sold through the American jeweler in the mid-1970s. In our opinion an Omega Tiffany pairing like this one is among the most honest routes into the double-signed genre: the same retail pedigree, carried on a watch made to be worn without ceremony.
The practice behind that second signature is worth understanding. From the 1950s into the mid-1970s, elite retailers such as Tiffany & Co., Türler, and Wempe bought watches directly from the Swiss houses and added their own name to the dial, a small printed endorsement that the piece had passed across their counters. The order of prestige was set by the store, and Tiffany sat at the very top of it alongside Cartier and Asprey. Genuinely original examples are far scarcer than the market pretends, which is why we read a clean, correct one as worth the attention.
The movement earns its own paragraph. It is signed OMEGA and numbered 1012, one of the twenty-three-jewel automatics from the family Omega launched in 1972 and built into the middle of the following decade. Its plate is engraved OMEGA SWISS and TWENTY-THREE 23 JEWELS, and the serial 37792389 places production in 1973. These calibers run at a modern 28,800 vibrations an hour with a quickset calendar and a hacking seconds, and Omega integrated the automatic winding into the movement itself rather than bolting it onto a hand-wound base, the kind of engineering that keeps a watch honest fifty years on. This is the standard grade rather than the chronometer version its sibling carried, and we like it the better for that. The draw is the architecture, a thin and robust everyday automatic, not a rating certificate it never wore.
The case is gold plated over a stainless steel core, and the inner caseback states the construction plainly: LUNETTE PLAQUÉ OR G 20 MICRONS over FOND ACIER INOXYDABLE, a genuine twenty-micron layer of gold rather than a passing flash of it, wrapped around the OMEGA WATCH Co triangle with FAB. SUISSE and SWISS MADE beneath, and the reference 166 0117 stamped at the foot. It measures 35mm across and 42mm from lug to lug on 18mm lugs, a proper mid-century dress size that sits flat and easy. The gold carries the fine hairlines and softening a watch worn for half a century should show, honest and unpolished. The outer back holds the detail we find hardest to walk past: it is hand-engraved as a retirement gift, best wishes for a happy retirement, dated 1975. Someone was handed this watch to mark the end of a working life, and it has carried that record ever since.
The dial is where all of it resolves. A silver surface finished in fine vertical brushing throws a soft linen sheen, and against it the applied Omega logo and OMEGA AUTOMATIC sit under twelve, TIFFANY & CO. reads in small serif capitals below the center, and SWISS MADE closes the foot. Applied faceted baton markers with dark centers ring the dial, answered by gold baton hands and a slim central seconds, while the day and date show through a framed window at three. There is no luminous material here and never was, which suits the dress intent, and the face has held its color cleanly. It reads exactly as it should: quiet and balanced, carrying one name more than it strictly needs.
We have fitted it to a black ostrich strap on an OTTUHR signed buckle, the raised quill pattern lending a little texture beneath the gold without pulling focus from the dial.
Serviced in-house at OTTUHR and backed by our 2-year mechanical warranty, it came off our timing machine keeping to within a few seconds a day. This is the Omega Tiffany for the collector who understands that provenance is not always loud, and that a jeweler’s name under Omega’s can say more than a case full of complications. Two signatures, one dial, fifty years of somebody’s life. That is the whole of it.
