There is a small but revealing shift underway in contemporary watchmaking. Heritage used to mean resemblance. A bezel was narrowed, a logo aged, a dial turned cream, and the past returned conveniently sized for the present. Singer Reimagined has chosen a more difficult route with the Heritage V72: the historical object is not the appearance but the mechanism itself. Inside sits an original Valjoux 72 manufactured more than six decades ago and never previously assembled into a watch, now dismantled, restored, refinished and placed inside a new 38.8mm case. Nostalgia has moved downstairs.
That matters because the Valjoux 72 hardly needs retrospective ennoblement. Introduced in 1938 and produced until 1974, the hand-wound column-wheel chronograph became industrial infrastructure for some of the twentieth century’s most desirable chronographs, appearing in watches by Rolex, Heuer, Breitling, Universal Genève and others. Singer therefore begins with something collectors already know how to revere. It does not need to invent the relic. It needs to explain why the relic should now belong to Singer.
The answer is restoration, and the word is doing considerable strategic work.
Singer’s origin makes the proposition unusually coherent. Restoration is already embedded in the brand’s founding story through Rob Dickinson’s work with significant sports cars; the Heritage Collection translates that logic to watch movements. Singer explicitly rejects reproduction and imitation: original calibres are dismantled, restored, hand-finished and installed in contemporary cases. The first Heritage chronograph of 2025 used the Valjoux 236. The V72 goes further back, and considerably further up the hierarchy of collective memory.
Then marketing performs its familiar act of disappearance. The press material speaks of soul, legends, rebirth, mechanical artistry and movements being revealed anew. Restoration becomes less a series of choices than an historical obligation finally fulfilled. The Valjoux 72 was once industrial; now we are invited to see that industriality as a temporary misunderstanding. Its bridges were apparently waiting to be frosted. Its bevels were waiting to be polished. Its architecture was waiting for a glass-box back. Singer has not merely decided to decorate and display an old calibre. The story gently suggests that the calibre has arrived at the condition it always deserved.
This is not to say the claim is fraudulent. Quite the opposite. The watch becomes interesting because the material fact survives the rhetoric. Singer says these are original, unassembled Valjoux 72 movements, and the SG7201 retains the calibre’s 18,000-vph frequency, 17 jewels and 44-hour power reserve while receiving frosted bridges, polished chamfers and satin-finished rhodium-plated components. The traditional three-register architecture remains visible on the dial: running seconds, 30-minute counter, 12-hour totaliser. Nothing revolutionary. Nothing needs to be.
In the hand, at least imaginatively until the watch is handled, the appeal is easy to locate. The steel case should feel compact rather than slight: 38.8mm across but 13.25mm high, its sunray satin surface interrupted by mirror-polished chamfers. Turn it and the rear sapphire rises into a glass box rather than ending obediently at the caseback. Light should catch first on the bevels, then fall into the old architecture below. Levers. Springs. The Y-shaped bridge. A column wheel doing its small mechanical bureaucracy. The effect is almost archaeological, except archaeology rarely comes this polished.
The steel version is the more persuasive composition. Stone grey, oyster-toned azurage, gold-coloured applied details, Singer’s habitual flash of orange. It avoids performing “vintage” too literally. The gold model is more ceremonious—black, champagne, 1N yellow gold—and consequently makes the argument louder. Singer calls the steel expression restrained and the gold one dramatic. For once, the adjectives are accurate.
Collectors will understand the temptation immediately because the V72 rearranges provenance in an unusual way. The movement carries historical significance, but not proprietary Singer history. Singer is not claiming that its ancestor built the calibre, nor that a Singer chronograph once crossed a finish line in 1965. Instead, it offers custodianship as authorship. The collector buys an authentic fragment of twentieth-century Swiss chronograph production whose first life, paradoxically, never happened.
That is a sophisticated pleasure. It is also an expensive one.
The steel Heritage V72 is CHF 23,000 before tax and limited to 50 pieces; the gold version is CHF 45,000 and limited to 20. The comparison inside Singer’s own catalogue is awkward in precisely the useful way. Last year’s Valjoux 236 Heritage launched at CHF 16,700. More pointedly, the Caballero arrived at CHF 17,500 with Singer’s first proprietary Calibre-4 Solotempo, a movement developed specifically for the brand, using four barrels to deliver a six-day power reserve. The V72 therefore asks us to accept a curious contemporary luxury equation: an old movement restored with exceptional care can cost substantially more than a new movement engineered expressly for the marque.
Perhaps that is the point.
Price in haute horlogerie has never been a clean measurement of mechanical invention. It prices scarcity, recognition, story, finishing, positioning and the anticipated pleasure of explaining the object to another informed person. Here the Valjoux name does some of the lifting. So do the 70 available movements. But scarcity is not liquidity, and historical importance does not automatically transfer from the calibre to every new watch that contains it. Singer has some auction credibility—two Track 1 examples recorded by Phillips sold above estimate—but that is hardly enough to construct a dependable secondary-market thesis. The V72 should be bought as a collector’s object, not as a disguised bond.
There is nevertheless strategic intelligence in what Singer is doing. The Heritage Collection gives the brand a second axis. One Singer develops new mechanisms and rethinks displays; the other restores canonical machinery and reframes it. Innovation on one side, conservation with ambition on the other. The danger will come if restoration becomes too easy a ladder for price escalation, because each successive “legend” then has to be more culturally charged than the last.
Eventually the attic runs out of icons.
Strip away the car analogy. Remove soul, reborn, legend. Forget the gold, the limited-edition arithmetic and the borrowed aura of Daytonas and Carreras. What remains is still unusual: an authentic Valjoux 72 made more than sixty years ago, apparently never previously assembled, finished far beyond its original industrial standard and displayed so that its architecture becomes the watch’s principal event.
That survivor is enough.
Not enough to make CHF 23,000 objectively sensible; luxury has never offered that service. Enough, however, to make the steel V72 irritatingly desirable. There is something indecently satisfying about becoming the first owner to wind a mechanism older than many of the watches that made it famous. Singer did not make the history. It found it, polished the edges, built a window around it and sent us the invoice.
One may raise an eyebrow.
The other hand is already reaching for the crown.
Sergio Galanti
About the Author
Swiss-based independent writer specialising in the luxury watch industry, consultant to private collectors and investors, and contributor to Italian and international watch publications. A Watch Expert certified by the FHH, he is the editor of WatchDossier (watchdossier.ch), a publication dedicated to the cultural and philosophical trends in contemporary watchmaking. He is the author of Against the Grain: A Cultural History of Swiss Independent Watchmaking.
No compensation or brand affiliation influenced this essay. Opinions are the author’s own.
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