Worn & Wound
Year in Review: Watch of the Year 2025
Our annual Watch of the Year post is here, and as always it’s a celebration of the diversity and strength of the enthusiast community. There’s a little of everything represented here, from the platonic idea of the Seiko diver, to highly experimental and ultra-modern, to emerging microbrands offering incredible value. But it’s not just about the watches themselves – every year has individual watches that are successful in the ways that get them onto lists like these. It’s the way our team assesses them, and gets to the heart of what makes a watch great, or interesting, or challenging. We hope you enjoy our roundup of our team’s favorite watches of 2025. Let us know yours in the comments below, and Happy New Year! Christoph McNeill For my Watch of the Year this year, I of course went with a Seiko. I know, no surprise there, but consistency is a good thing right? What can I say, I absolutely love Seiko. And I’m not just a homer, they really do put out killer stuff year after year. I nearly picked one of the amazing and beautiful Grand Seikos (the SLGW007 ‘birch’ dial), but I’ve written about the Grand Seikos a lot, and as stunning as they are, I’m a dive watch guy at heart and there is one Seiko diver that really blew me away this year. I’m talking about the Seiko Prospex Marinemaster SLA081 Limited Edition “Shinkai” diver. For brevity’s sake I’ll just refer to it as the Shinkai from here on out. The Shinkai diver is modeled after the OG ...
