Spend any time in a vintage watch shop and a pattern shows up fast. The dress watches everyone asks for, slim, hand-wound, somewhere near 35 mm, are the same ones that sell the moment they hit the tray. Amsterdam Vintage Watches built its name selling exactly those watches. Now it has built one instead, with Paris microbrand Archi Works, and the result is The Diplomat 1.87.
Two dials, 100 pieces each, and a hand-finished movement you can watch through the caseback. I keep coming back to the restraint of the thing. Nothing on this watch is there to fill a spec sheet.
Archi Works calls The Diplomat its tribute to the vintage watches the two teams love finding, collecting and preserving. I believe them, because every choice here points backward on purpose, then gets executed with modern tolerances.
A sector dial, set with stones
The Aurora opens the pair with a cream sector dial. A brushed silver chapter ring carries the hour markers, and the color lives at the edges: a warm yellow minute track, faceted emerald baguettes standing tall at 12, 3 and 9, round-cut diamonds at every other hour.
The small seconds sits recessed at 6, its center warmed to the same yellow, its hand blued, and the Amsterdam Vintage Watches signature curves along the subdial’s upper edge. It reads like a dial from 1948 that never had to survive 1948.
A sector dial earns its name from the rings: an outer minute track, a brushed chapter ring for the hours, and a calm center where the signatures sit. It is a mid-century layout, and the gemstones could have wrecked it. They don’t, because the stones replace the markers instead of decorating around them. The yellow track on the Aurora does the same warm work the grey track does quietly on the Azure.
Azure takes the temperature down
The Azure runs the same architecture in silver and grey. Sapphire baguettes replace the emeralds, the minute track drops to a darker grey, the small seconds center cools to a lighter grey, and the strap turns blue, Molequin Saffiano leather like the Aurora’s green. Same watch, different mood entirely. The Aurora is the one I’d wear to dinner. The Azure is the one I’d keep on all week.
Both straps are Molequin Oxford Saffiano, handmade in France, on quick-release bars. Green for the Aurora, blue for the Azure, each matched to the stones set in its dial. Swap them with your fingernails: no tools, no scratched lugs.
Thirty-five millimeters, on purpose
The case is 316L steel in three parts, 35 mm across, with a sloping polished bezel over a brushed mid-case. It stands 8.65 mm thick, 10.05 mm once you count the sapphire crystal, and the lugs take a 19 mm strap on drilled tips, a detail vintage collectors notice because it makes strap swaps painless.
Every case carries its number engraved on the side. Two hundred numbers cover both dials. When they’re gone, they’re gone.
On the wrist, 35 mm is the whole argument. Modern dress watches ballooned toward 40 mm and started wearing like saucers. This one sits the way the vintage pieces in AVW’s trays sit, and at 10.05 mm thick it slides under a cuff without a fight.
A Peseux 7001, finished the slow way
Flip the watch over and the exhibition caseback, engraved “King of Vintage” around its rim, shows where the money went. Inside sits La Joux-Perret’s take on the Peseux 7001, a hand-wound caliber just 2.5 mm thick, finished in Soigné grade with Côtes de Genève on the bridges, sunburst bevels, polished wheels and heat-blued screws, and a 50-hour reserve.
This is finishing you normally go hunting for in vintage pieces, because modern production at this price rarely bothers.
The 50-hour reserve helps the romance along. Wind it at your desk on Friday, set it down, and it is still running when you pick it up on Sunday evening.
Two hundred pieces, one shop
Orders opened on November 7, only on Archiwatch, and this is a sale, not a pre-order: the makers say the watches ship the following week. The price is about $2,600 with shipping included, and the box holds a leather travel case and a certificate of origin, with a one-year warranty behind the watch.
One cost to plan around: that price excludes taxes, so the final number depends on where the watch lands.
Editor’s take
I have handled enough vintage dress watches to know the deal. You fall for the size and the dial, then you inherit a stranger’s service history. The Diplomat skips that trade. It is the watch AVW’s customers keep asking the shop to find, built new, finished by hand, and priced where a serious vintage piece sits anyway. If 35 mm is your size, pick the dial you’d wear with everything, and pick it before the numbers run out.