A Grand Seiko Elegance Collection SBGW262, Hand Wound, In Rose Gold, With Urushi Lacquer Dial

Grand Seiko is such a firmly established part of the modern watch landscape that it’s easy to forget that it hasn’t been around for all that long – the first Grand Seiko watches were introduced to the market in 1960 and with a hiatus in production, from the mid-1970s to 1986, GS watches have been around ever since. Until 2017, however, Grand Seiko was a sub-brand of Seiko (along with many others including Credor) and 2017 was the year that Grand Seiko became a separate brand. That was also the year that Grand Seiko’s designs and collections really started to diversify both from a design standpoint and technically, and we’ve gotten to a point now where Grand Seiko on the technical side, is producing watches like the Kodo Constant Force Tourbillon. That watch is a world first for Grand Seiko and in watchmaking, with a one second constant force mechanism (remontoir d’egalité, as it’s called in Switzerland) on the same axis as the tourbillon cage. What we have here today for A Watch A Week, however, is what a lot of Grand Seiko enthusiasts think Grand Seiko still does better than anyone else: a three hand, time-only dress watch that connects directly not only to Grand Seiko watchmaking, but also to Japanese culture: the Elegance Collection SBGW262, with an urushi lacquer dial.

This is a dress watch and no mistake, at 39mm x 11.6mm, with a yellow gold, 30mm water resistant case. The case design was first introduced in the Elegance Collection when it launched in 2019, just a couple of years after Grand Seiko became its own brand, and it’s a sort of modified cushion case that Grand Seiko refers to rather pragmatically as the “Thin Dress Series” case design group in the larger Elegance Collection. The bezel is relatively thin so the dials, which are always a very big part of the draw for Grand Seiko, have plenty of real estate despite the watches being at a manageable size appropriate for their more formal design, and the lugs, which have a slight bevel on the inner edges, are fairly short so the watch overall isn’t going to have any trouble fitting on a slimmer wrist.

The hands are exactly to the quality you’d expect from Grand Seiko, which is to say, excellent. The overall first impression you get is of a quietly luxurious watch that isn’t going out of its way to attract your attention but definitely rewards attention. Grand Seiko’s designs can be very obviously luxuriously executed – the Evolution 9 watches, for instance, have brilliantly reflective diamond cut indexes which glitter like so many diamonds, but the Elegance Collection in general and the Thin Dress Series in particular, are a quieter, but no less well-executed group.

Japanese lacquer, or urushi, is made from the sap of the Chinese lacquer tree, Toxicodendron vernicifluum, which as the name implies produces a toxic compound called urushiol which is part of the sap that gets turned to lacquer, and part of the process of becoming a traditional lacquerware artist involves developing an immunity to the poison. The sap, when dried and mixed with pigments, can be built up layer by layer into hard, glossy, waterproof surfaces and the art of making lacquerware is very old, with some lacquer objects dating back 10,000 years. The tree is cultivated for its sap in Japan, Korea and of course, China and black lacquer is one of the traditional ancient colors, which was originally obtained by mixing charcoal with the lacquer.

The resulting surface has a distinctive depth and richness, different from the more radiant surface finishes found on many Grand Seiko dials but almost more seductive. The hour markers are done in a technique called maki-e, in which gold or silver powder is painted or blown onto the lacquer surface (maki-e is used for many different types of decorative and useful objects, including the bodies of pens and maki-e Japanese fountain pens are avidly collected by pen lovers).

The movements for the first series of Elegance Thin Dress watches were a new hand-wound movement, the caliber 9S63, which has a small seconds subdial at 9:00 and a power reserve at 3:00 and which when it was introduced, was a rare launch of a hand would movement for Grand Seiko and in fact for the industry at large, which as a rule relies almost exclusively on automatics. The caliber 9s64 like the 9S63 is hand wound as well, but with a center seconds hand rather than a subdial, and with no power reserve indication (my experience over the years from talking to Grand Seiko fans is that there’s nothing that divides them like dial-side power reserve indications). It’s a little confusing and I’m not sure why Grand Seiko handled the numbering convention this way, but despite what you might think the 9S64 is actually the older movement, having been introduced by GS in 2011.

The caliber 9S64 is a very traditional piece of work, with a 3/4 plate architecture and antishock springs on both the balance and the escape wheel (the latter, a skeletonized LIGA-fabricated wheel; the skeletonizing is there to reduce inertia and improve efficiency, and therefore, energy transfer to the lever and the balance.) There’s a screw-type fine regulator and a flat balance spring, with a full three day power reserve – Grand Seiko’s fond of the idea of putting a dress watch down on a Friday night and being able to find it still running on Monday morning – and it’s adjusted to six positions (one more than the traditional five) and temperature.

There’s a little bit of confusion about how much hand-finishing actually goes into a Grand Seiko movement and the answer is that GS has several different standards depending on the type of movement and the type of watch. In the Credor and high end Spring Drive watches, like the Spring Drive Eight Day, you have hand finishing on a Dufour level, and that’s literally true; Philippe Dufour famously advised Grand Seiko’s Micro Artist Studio movement finishers on movement finishing and he (in)famously said in 2015 “I’m sorry, if you want to know where the best finishing is nowadays, I have to tell you, it’s not in Switzerland” which is still partly true, though not as much as it was ten years ago. In the 9S64, what you get is very high quality industrial finishing. (The closest thing to it is what you see in Rolex movements, which are also industrially finished to an extremely high level).

You don’t have any anglage, hand-finished or otherwise, in the 9S64; there are no large, mirror polished countersinks or black polished steel components, or heat blued screws (although Grand Seiko famously does use heat blued steel for its blued seconds hands, as well as thermally blued screws in some of its higher end Credor and GS movements) but what you do have is absolutely crisp, razor sharp high precision machine finishing and at the price point a lot of GS production sits at, I would far rather have that than any marginally convincing imitation of hand finishing.

As always, production for the caliber 9S64 is totally in house, including all the escapement components, the balance spring, the Spron-alloy mainspring, all wheels, pinions, plates, bridges, dials and hands – even the lubricant. Seiko and Grand Seiko are some of the most vertically integrated watch producers in the world, even growing their own quartz crystals. Movement precision for the 9S64 is +5/-3 seconds per day, which is a second better at both the front and the back end than the +6/-4 standard required by the COSC. I should point out one nice detail in the 9S64; if you look closely, you can see a flat jewel underneath the click spring; that’s there to prevent any rubbing by the spring against the mainplate, in order to reduce wear and tear. This is a small but meaningful example of the thoughtful watchmaking – real, practical watchmaking – that goes into GS movements.

Overall this is a beautiful piece of watchmaking and a wonderful example of how Grand Seiko got to where it is today – elevation of craft to the point where it becomes an aesthetic in its own right, and a lot of solid, sturdy, intelligent, no nonsense watchmaking. This is a keeper, and a daily driver, if you’re driving in the dress lane, if ever there was one.

The Grand Seiko Elegance SBGW262, 39mm x 11.6mm yellow gold case, water resistant to 30 meters. Dial in black Japanese urushi lacquer, decorated with gold and silver dust maki-e. Movement, hand-wound Grand Seiko caliber 9S64, running in 24 jewels at 28,800 vph with a 72 hour power reserve, adjusted in six positions and to temperature, to +5/-3 seconds per day. 

The 1916 Company is proud to be an authorized retailer for Grand Seiko; and see our pre-owned Grand Seiko collections here.

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