Summer Hand Watch

Todd Snyder's first watch collaboration with Timex early last year was an instant classic, a handsome timepiece that blended vintage inspiration and modern design in all the right ways. This past summer, the two brands paired up again for the Timex x Todd Snyder Mod, an utterly eye-catching watch that fused retro motifs with military timekeeping and sold out in no time. So our expectations were pretty high when we heard the duo was joining forces once again. Would this new timepiece capture the high-end appeal the previous iterations had at the same bank-account friendly price?
The short answer is yes. The long answer is hell yes. Snyder's M.O. is to mine the best of American menswear's past, rethink it, make it better, and put the finished product out into the world packaged as something shiny, new, and, most importantly, modern. And that's just what he's done here. The Timex x Todd Snyder Military Watch is just what it sounds like, a timepiece born from the military watches of yesteryear, but modernized—and made affordable.

There's a lot to admire about the watch, starting with it's clean design. Despite the rugged associations military-inspired watches have (and which, to large extent make them interesting in the first place), Snyder's version comes off as streamlined. It's hard to make a watch like this modern, but the designer succeeds. The combination of a clean black face and contrasting white indices lend a sparse, modernist sensibility to the design, offset by a brushed silver tone case and drab olive green NATO strap that could convince someone you’ve had it in your collection for years. "This is my favorite style to date," Snyder told GQ. "It's inspired from the military spec issue from the 1960's. We searched the Timex archives for this one-of-kind piece and begged them to let us re-release it....and they did." Like the twosome's previous instantly-sold-out model, though, there's only one problem: securing one for yourself before they're gone.