Introduction
When Grand Seiko recently launched the latest recreation of the first Grand Seiko - SBGW295 - I was immediately reminded of a ‘redone’ dialed first Grand Seiko that sold a few months back on Yahoo Japan.
I was going to write up some brief musings on the new release (not least the fact that the dial would seem to contribute to in excess of 50% of the cost of the watch at retail), and then my mind wandered, and it occurred to me that - to the best of my knowledge - nobody had ever written an article that detailed every modern Grand Seiko reference that is a recreation of the first Grand Seiko.
When I first started collecting Grand Seiko, I kept a record of the modern recreations of the vintage references - not just the “First”, but also the 57GS, 44GS, and 62GS.
There was a period in the early to mid 2010’s when it looked like Grand Seiko were working their way through all the vintage series, issuing both “recreations”, where the overall watch design was intended to pretty much replicate that of the core vintage pieces, and “reinterpretations”, where the vintage piece was taken as a starting point, and then brought more up-to-date.
Following the release of three recreations of the first Grand Seiko in 2011 (and as we will shortly see, this wasn’t the first time that Grand Seiko had recreated their first reference), there followed recreations and reinterpretations of the 44GS in 2013, the 57GS in 2014, and the 62GS in 2015.
Below are pictured SBGW047 and SBGR081 - examples of the recreation and reinterpretation of the 44GS.
For whatever reason - quite possibly the decision to completely reimagine the brand and split it off from the parent company in 2017, we never got to see recreations of any of the later vintage series.
I might cover those other releases in another article at some point in the future, but for now, I will be detailing only the true recreations of the “First”.
For those interested in the vintage first Grand Seiko, please do check out the primer article I wrote at the tail end of last year -
Credit
I am indebted to the work of Anthony Kable of Plus9Time, who has created, and is maintaining, a database of every modern Grand Seiko reference, from SBGS001 released in 1988, through to the current day, and beyond.
Without Anthony’s extraordinary efforts, the history of the first Grand Seiko recreations would have been considerably more difficult to write. As we are about to discover, there are a lot of references to cover!
The references detailed below are listed in chronological order of release by year, and then alphabetically by reference number within the year. For full details on any of the references, I would encourage the reader to visit Anthony’s database.
Clicking on the reference number above the photo will take you directly to the relevant entry in the database.
SBGW004 (released in 2001)
Although it could be argued that there are a couple of earlier references that were “inspired” by the first Grand Seiko (such as the rather enigmatic SBGS005 in platinum, which even has the branding text at the top of the dial), the 18K yellow gold cased SBGW004 was the first time Grand Seiko set out to recreate their original reference in the modern era.
With a case diameter (excluding crown) of 35mm, the watch is sized almost identically to the original, but the immediately obvious thing about it is that - like all other recreations of the “Firsts” that were to follow - the word “Chronometer” is missing from the dial under the Grand Seiko logo.
This is an unfortunate result of Grand Seiko adhering to the ridiculous demands of the Swiss watch industry that no watch can call itself a Chronometer unless it has undergone testing in Switzerland. On the plus side, it does mean that you can always differentiate a modern recreation from the original vintage piece very easily!
SBGW004 was issued in a limited edition of 300 pieces, at a price of 880,000 Yen, to commemorate the 120th anniversary of Seiko.