Are Watch Collectors Finally Tired of Heritage Reissues?

The last two months alone have brought the reboot of Gallet watches, a new Blancpain Bathyscaphe anniversary edition, and a 50th anniversary tribute to the IWC Ingenieur SL. In horology, there are few topics more polarizing than heritage. Talk to one collector and they'll say they love the connection to history packaged with modern-day reliability. Talk to another and they'll roll their eyes and say "could brands just do something original for a change?" Despite the strong opinions of the latter, the rate at which these watches launch doesn't seem to be slowing.

"Heritage watches tell a story, and in the case of Tudor, that's the story of one of the first modern dive watches that has been used by underwater professionals for over seven decades," said Christophe Chevalier, head of public relations at Tudor. Tudor's Black Bay 54 is not a limited edition. Introduced in 2023 and still in the standard collection, it brought the line down to the 37mm case and small crown of the brand's first dive watch, the 1954 reference 7922, though it keeps a snowflake hour hand that did not appear on a Tudor Submariner until 1969.

Nostalgia has played a huge role in popular culture and fashion in the last decade, evident in film and television remakes and spinoffs, and in cyclical street style and runway trends. Watch brands have followed, though not in one direction. Gallet, largely dormant since the family sold the name in the 1990s and now revived by Breitling, launched all four of its new collections at once at Geneva Watch Days in early September, two hundred years after the firm was founded in La Chaux-de-Fonds. Blancpain's reissue of the 1968 Bathyscaphe held the case at 37.4mm instead of scaling it up, as reissues often do. IWC's anniversary pair is not a reissue at all, but a brushed silver dial fitted to the current Ingenieur Automatic. It marks a Gérald Genta design IWC's own press material says was "not a commercial success" at launch, with 598 pieces of Reference 1832 built between 1976 and 1983. Christian Knoop, IWC's creative director, said in that release that the design "has lost none of its power and magic to this day."

For NYC-based watch collector Vasu Kulkarni, @nycwatchguy on Instagram, it was the rebirth of Daniel Roth that has him considering the reissue route. "When the first reissues came out, the original watches were still on offer for a fraction of the CHF 140,000 list price [roughly $171,000] of those new watches," Kulkarni said, adding, "Unfortunately those early watches have blown up now. These days, for the right price I'm still keeping my eyes out for a reissue of the Daniel Roth Tourbillon, even though it feels like a bit of a cop-out for having missed the boat on the real Daniel Roth watches when I had the chance."

For Connecticut-based vintage watch collector Michael Piscatelli, weariness with reissues isn't all-encompassing. "I have fatigue around reissues that aren't completely true to the original watch. I just don't see the point of reissues that are bigger than the original watch, causing the dial proportions and balance to get out of whack. I haven't purchased any reissues in quite some time, but there's been a really strong pull towards a few; Zenith's El Primero reissues, the A385 and A386 revivals in particular. These were so true to the original watches that the temptation was very strong," he said.

Market trends seem to support a lingering demand for classic reissues. The Vacheron Constantin 222 in gold, the Zenith Revival A384, and several Cartier references have seen market values rise by more than 10% over the past year, according to WatchCharts. In the case of the Zenith, it's still trading hands below its original list price, but the watch has bounced back from an initial post-sale lull within a decade of the reissue's 2019 launch.

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Horologist Nicholas Manousos, a board member of The Watch Library Foundation and a juror for the 2026 Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève, told Crown & Caliber, "Horology has always been a discipline of quotation, and the shapes that read as timeless were arrived at through iteration rather than invention. What we need to consider is what will the industry have to reissue in 30 years. The archive is finite, and independent watch brands, most of whom have no archive at all, are the ones making the designs a future generation will want to revisit."

Genta's own name is already being mined that way. Credor brought back his 1979 Locomotive in 2024 for its own 50th anniversary, in an edition of 300. The new watch is titanium and automatic where its predecessor was steel and quartz, and at 38.8mm it is bigger than the 35mm original, the kind of growth Piscatelli objects to. "I am sure he would be delighted to know of its rebirth," Evelyne Genta, his widow and business partner, said in Seiko's announcement. LVMH had revived the Gérald Genta brand itself the year before, under Jean Arnault at La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton, the same workshop behind Daniel Roth's Tourbillon Souscription, and its first commercial release was a remake of Genta's 1994 Gentissima Oursin. Genta founded that brand in 1969, the same year the El Primero A384 and Tudor's snowflake hands arrived, and all three are on sale in 2026.