Vintage Longines Pocket Watch 7713-5 Cal. 428 Circa 1970s papers Serviced

SPECIFICATION

Reference: 7713-5
Movement: Cal 428
Age: circa 1970s
Case Size: 41mm
Case Thickness: 8mm
Condition: used Longines Pocket watch
Box & Papers: papers only
Case Material: Stainless Steel
Warranty: 12-Months Warranty

POINTS OF MENTION

• In lovely pre-owned condition, with light wear from use
  
• Clean time-only dial layout
• Longines chain
• Fully serviced manually wound movement
• Signed Longines crown
  

The Longines 7713 pocket watch

This is a wonderfully elegant Longines pocket watch from the late 1960s, capturing the clean and increasingly minimalist design language of the period.

Its stainless-steel case has a slim, uncomplicated profile, giving the watch a far more modern appearance than the heavier and more traditional pocket watches of earlier generations. The result is a beautifully refined piece that feels equally at home with formal tailoring today as it would have done when first produced.

The dial is particularly attractive in its simplicity. The applied Longines name and famous winged-hourglass emblem sit beneath 12 o’clock, while the slender hands and restrained hour markers preserve the wonderfully calm and balanced appearance. With no date window or unnecessary dial text to interrupt the design, very little distracts from its elegant proportions.

Inside is Longines’ calibre 428, a manually wound mechanical movement originally created for use in slim wristwatches. Its compact construction made it ideally suited to this unusually sleek interpretation of a pocket watch, allowing Longines to produce something far removed from the substantial pocket-watch movements of earlier generations.

The movement has been fully serviced by our in-house watchmaker and is ready to be enjoyed once again.

LONGINES AND THE RETURN OF THE POCKET WATCH

By the end of the 1960s, the pocket watch was no longer the everyday necessity it had once been. Wristwatches had long since become the dominant way of carrying time, yet changing fashions created a small but fascinating revival of interest.

The mid to late 1960s saw a return to expressive menswear, including three-piece suits, waistcoats and increasingly adventurous formal tailoring. This transformation became known as the “Peacock Revolution”. A slim pocket watch could once again form part of that look, although the large and often substantial pocket watches of previous generations did not always suit the cleaner lines of the era.

Longines’ approach was distinctly modern. Rather than recreating a traditional pocket watch around a large movement, the company used the compact calibre 428 within a slim, purpose-designed case. The result retained the character and ceremony of carrying a pocket watch while feeling unmistakably contemporary.

There is a pleasing historical irony to its construction. The wristwatch had evolved from the pocket watch, yet several decades later Longines effectively reversed that journey, placing a wristwatch-sized movement inside a fashionable new pocket-watch design.

OUR THOUGTHS

This is a wonderfully unusual piece of Longines history. While today’s AP-inspired Swatch Pop Watch offers a playful take on the pocket watch, this vintage Longines is the real thing, beautifully made, wonderfully elegant and full of period character. Perhaps most remarkably, it offers all that history and refinement for very similar money.

Whether worn traditionally with a waistcoat, carried as an occasional dress piece or simply enjoyed as part of a Longines collection, it is a fascinating reminder that fashion rarely travels in a straight line. The pocket watch had given way to the wristwatch, only for Longines to reverse the journey and return a wristwatch movement to the pocket.