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Welcome to Dialed In, where we’ll highlight the very best, most interesting, and coolest new watches in the world.
The watch: Urwerk’s Stormtrooper-inspired EMC TimeHunter
The single best thing about this watch: This white ceramic version of Urwerk’s EMC TimeHunter model is inspired by Star Wars’s hapless Imperial lackeys. By design, Stormtroopers are anonymous, uniform defenders of the Empire—but once in a while a special one comes along and breaks the mold. Much like John Boyega’s Finn in the latest trilogy, this new Stormtrooper-inspired watch from Urwerk is anything but ordinary.
The backstory:As clearly evidenced by the Area 51 artifact-looking watches they design, Urwerk founders Feliz Baumgartner and Martin Frei are sci-fi fanatics. Star Wars, in particular, has been a guiding force for several of the brand’s pieces already. The spaceship-shaped UR-220 was codenamed the “Falcon Project” after Han Solo’s beloved Millenium Falcon, while a gold version of one of the brand’s first pieces was called the C3PO. Stormtroopers weren’t exactly a threat to the galaxy, but much like a Brooklyn creative who launched a podcast this year, they looked great and stylish even in failure. “The Stormtrooper was designed to intimidate but also look super cool and super clean,” Urwerk said in a press release. The same all-white coating that made Stormtroopers look slick works on this handsome EMC.
And before you start twisting yourself into ethical knots wondering if you should wear a watch in support of evil Empire cronies, Baumgartner and Frei have an answer. “Just like our hero’s Luke Skywalker and Han Solo in Stars Wars when they dressed up in Stormtroopers armour to rescue Princess Leia,” the brand wrote. “The EMC Stormtrooper is 100% pure rebel inside.”
This piece matters in the world of watches because: If you guessed that EMC stands for “Electro Mechanical Control,” then you nailed it. While the Urwerk EMC is a mechanical-powered watch, an electronic circuit board buried alongside the movement differentiates this piece. The system helps monitor the watch’s accuracy and then spits the information out to the dials in the watch’s top-right corner. The first scale tells the wearer whether the mechanical time the watch is measuring is 15 seconds ahead or behind, and the second measures the movement’s amplitude—think of it as a check engine light for your watch. The beauty of having all this byzantine info on your wrist is that Urwerk is making immediately accessible knowledge that would typically require a trip to your local watch repairman to uncover. Urwerk’s also put an adjustment screw on the back so that if the watch is deviating from the real time, the owner can fuss around with it until it’s back on track. Or, as the philosophers at Urwerk put it: “this allows the owner to adjust the time to suit his own lifestyle.”
Did you just convince me to buy a one-in-five $129,000 watch inspired by a Stormtrooper? Yes, George Lucas, I did.
Where and when to buy it: The watch is available to buy online at various boutiques now.
