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Japan Street Watch
Travis Scott is obviously in the mood for surprises. He popped up in a recent trailer for The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s incoming blockbuster based on the Greek epic, as some kind of poet or storyteller, wielding a staff and chanting about “a trick to break the walls of Troy and burn it straight into the ground”. Talk about a high-level side quest.
Watch spotters got another shock from the rapper at the Super Bowl earlier this week. There were a lot of big flexes from the great and good – Tom Brady with an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar; half-time headliner Bad Bunny also in a Royal Oak, this one green and gold – but Scott (dressed in a lot of Chanel menswear and retro Oakley sunnies) might’ve stolen the show. And it wasn’t with some seven-figure skeletonised wonder, but a humble Seiko: a vintage Seiko calculator watch, the C515, made in the '80s, which has a calculator function with a keypad to match. American football is generally an impenetrable mystery to non-Americans; for all we know, maybe you need a number-crunching device to figure out who’s actually winning.
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Japan Street Watch
Anyway, this Seiko is quite the choice from a guy whose watch collection is usually extremely elite. He has a penchant for Richard Milles, wearing the limited-edition RM 75-01 Flying Tourbillon Sapphire and RM 27-04 Tourbillon Rafael Nadal in recent months. In 2023, Scott cooked up his own Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar model in brown ceramic, which quickly found its way on to the wrists of collectors like Lionel Messi.
So – we know Scott has many, probably dozens, of watches that cost a lot of money and are very, very rare. But wearing an old quartz watch you can pick up used for a couple hundred pounds shows a particular kind of confidence. “This endorsement of a vintage Seiko when he has plenty of other great watches to wear – including his own Royal Oak – was thrilling for any vintage watch fanatic like myself,” says the watch dealer Eric Wind. “It does feel like vintage watches are on a great run and people are realising how cool they are and the storytelling that can happen just by wearing [one].”
Vintage watches are absolutely on a run – and maybe Travis Scott’s Super Bowl flex will set Seiko on one too. High-end Grand Seikos already get their share of appreciation, but the mainline brand is so ubiquitous it can sometimes paradoxically get overlooked. It shouldn’t be, especially when its vast catalogue contains so many retro goodies to pick up. Make like Scott, and launch your Seiko odyssey. And if the sums don't add up, you know where to find a calculator.