Don't miss the next drop
One small window does all the calendar work on this Movado. It sits at three, framed in gilt with rounded corners, black numerals on a pale disc, and it is the only complication on the dial. Every other mark on the face is there for the hours and minutes, which leaves the date as the one place the watch counts past midnight.
Movado knew far more elaborate ways to put a calendar on a dial. Its Calendograf arrived in 1938 with the day and month in two small windows and the date read from a pointer hand that traveled around the edge of the dial, and by 1948 a self-winding version, the Calendomatic, had joined it. Set beside those, this vintage Movado automatic asks almost nothing of its owner: one number, in one frame, read at a glance. We think the restraint makes it the easier watch to live with.
Behind the dial runs caliber 438, a Movado movement that pairs the date with automatic winding. In this period Movado designed and built its own movements, and the rotor here is signed MOVADO FACTORIES along its edge. It is a broad, curved sweep with cutouts, and it turns with the wrist to wind the mainspring, so a watch worn regularly is built to stay wound without a daily session at the crown.
White as it is, the dial is worked in layers. Gold-tone numerals, applied rather than printed, stand at twelve and six, faceted wedge markers hold the other hour positions, and a dotted minute track carries a darker round plot at each hour. Dauphine hands and a slim center seconds hand pass over the top, and under the Movado name the word automatic is set in italics, a small piece of script that names what the rotor is doing out of sight.
The years have left their marks. The dial has fine speckling and gentle, uneven toning, the hands have darkened along their centers, and the gold-filled case carries light scuffs, most of them on the outer edge of the bezel.
On its olive leather strap, the case comes to 34mm across and 40mm from lug to lug. Its movement and dial are Swiss, with SWITZERLAND signed at the foot of the dial, while the 14k gold-filled case is stamped U.S.A. inside the back beside the Movado name and the reference number 64389. In profile it is mostly dome and lug: a tall crystal rising over a stepped bezel, and lugs that narrow to points as they bend down toward the strap.
