Hands-On: the Longines Spirit Zulu Time Titanium

Longines, somehow, still feels slept on to me. In the hierarchy or Swatch Group brands, they sit in a place where they really should be insanely popular with enthusiasts and the mass market alike, but somehow they often feel like a brand struggling to break into the wider conversation. To be fair, I have no idea about the relative commercial success Longines has experienced over these last few years – it’s quite possible that everyone at Longines and Swatch are quite happy with their performance. Anecdotally, though, I just don’t see them on wrists very often, either at local neighborhood watch meetups, or in the wild.

And that’s kind of a shame, because whenever I actually spend time with a Longines watch, I come away feeling impressed. I’ve long held that they do vintage reissues better than just about anyone. Whoever has the job of raiding the archives and picking watches to resurface from the brand’s long history has impeccable taste, and an innate understanding of the watches that hit the center of the Venn Diagram covering “aesthetically interesting” and “historically important.” They’ve done a great job of telling the brand’s story with a string of excellent heritage releases. 

But Longines is too big, of course, to just release vintage inspired watches, so in a moment a few years back when it was clear that the heritage gravy train wasn’t going to run forever, they introduced the Spirit collection. An entirely new line, the Spirit watches bridged the gap between “vintage inspired” design notes and the contemporary sports watch. They are ostensibly aviation inspired, but work remarkably well as straightforward daily wear pieces. 

When the Spirit collection was introduced it felt like a big swing for Longines. Any entirely new collection from a brand with a history like Longines is, but the Spirit watches felt more ambitious because they were trading on their recent history of success with their heritage reissues to create a kind of hybrid: a watch that is imbued with the brand’s history but still feels fresh. And it was suddenly just here, that rarest of birds in the watch industry, a brand new collection, fully formed, that felt like it had real purpose out of the gate.