Growing up a Northern Youth, I found Sundays were typically spent daydreaming. I would imagine leaving my small Ohio town and seeing the world. I would pour over books about Japan, Finland and Sweden, and imagine what it might be like to visit, or even live in such places. 22 years later, I can answer those questions. But I still wonder about things not yet seen, or things that went away that I wish would come back.
This past year Swatch miracled many of us with a reissue of Keith Haring Swatches in partnership with Disney. But having spent some time in France, and Besançon in particular, I keep hoping for one specific watch to come back in a mechanical or self-winding format, and that would be Roger Tallon's iconic creation, the Mach 2000 from Lip -  |
| Photo kindly shared by a collector who prefers to remain anonymous |
This is an example of the "original" version. It sports
the red, yellow and blue color code that is now synonymous with the Mach 2000. Under the hood is a manual winding Valjoux movement.
Now point of full disclosure, although I have visited the Lip HQ and factory in Besançon, I do not have any "inside info" on any possible reiteration of the Mach 2000. The team at Lip play their cards very, very close to their vest and as far as I know, the hope for a new mechanical/automatic Mach 2000 is probably just my own late winter Sunday daydream. But wouldn't it be cool?
Now I realize that we are living in different times than the 1970s, and the cost of a Valjoux chronograph is far loftier (when allowing for inflation to current prices) than it was back when the Mach 2000 made its debut, but my hope is that the team at Lip will find a way to bring back a mechanical/automatic Mach 2000 and offer it at a price that stays true to the ethos of Lip - great watches at a fair price. Here's hoping that 2021 will flip the script on 2020 and we'll have some positive surprises!
For now, there is still a great option that in many ways perhaps out-Tallons the original -
Monsieur Tallon was, at his heart, a modernist. And when we go back to the birth of the Mach 2000, a quartz movement was like water from the moon. A Valjoux chronograph made a great deal more fiscal sense. But I suspect that being a modernist, he would have been interested in the latest technology. Sorta' funny how things change! In many ways, I suspect that the current model is what he would have designed and what Lip would have made if it would not have been so shockingly cost prohibitive. That's just my take on it, but there you go.
At any rate it's Sunday, and I'm going to return to my daydreaming ; )
Enjoy your watches!
