This is a beautifully restored vintage Zodiac Rotographic automatic, freshly serviced and regulated and running well, with a warm gold presence and classic mid-century proportions. The Rotographic line captures Zodiac at its most elegant: slim, clean, and intentionally understated, with just enough dial detail to feel special without tipping into busy. With the heavy lifting already done mechanically, this is the kind of vintage automatic you can actually wear and enjoy.

I added this Universal Genève to my collection because it checks the boxes I’m always hunting for: a great looking vintage watch that’s genuinely elegant and mechanically significant. The dial is what hooks me—clean, balanced, and just a little sharper than the average 1950s dress watch thanks to those applied arrowhead markers with integrated lume, as opposed to the more typical “lume dots as an afterthought” setup.

The movement is the real reason it stays in my collection. Universal’s cal. 138SS is one of the brand’s important early automatics—a classic bumper design introduced around 1948, right at the moment when automatic winding was still evolving fast. This is a watch from the “in-between” years—when automatics still had personality you can feel every time the bumper twitches on the wrist.

I added this Zodiac to my collection because this simple, sub-second dress model is a great example of what Zodiac used to be before it was consumed by sport and dive watches in the 1960s. I also love the contrast between the gold hands and markers and the bright silver (rhodium) case - a combination that goes particularly well with the navy blue strap.