Worn & Wound
Longines Makes Some Significant Updates to the Spirit Collection with a Pair of New Releases
Longines has announced a pair of new watches in their Spirit collection today, and taken together it feels like a fairly significant shift and update for the five year old line. When the Spirit watches launched in 2020, it represented Longines making an attempt to develop watches that put more of a balance on contemporary vs. vintage inspired divide, having spent years carving out a niche as one of the most tasteful reinterpreters of their own back catalog. The Spirit watches were an entirely new invention but still leaned into the brand’s natural heritage appeal, and impressed from the start with excellent finishing and build quality. As the collection expanded over the years, it’s grown full of under the radar sleepers, but a handful of little issues are always mentioned by admittedly picky enthusiasts when new products drop. At least some of those seem to have been addressed between these new releases, updated versions of the Spirit Pilot and Spirit Pilot Flyback. We’ll look at the Spirit Pilot Flyback first, as it’s a genuinely surprising and unexpected evolution of an ambitious watch that Longines debuted just two years ago. Longines has a long history with chronographs, and flyback chronographs specifically, so the introduction of a new flyback chrono at a competitive price point (at launch it came in under $5,000 in steel) was a big deal. Unfortunately, the case was just enormous, coming in at 42mm in diameter and around 17mm tall. The case height, in part...
