There’s something strangely fitting about a new Timex collaboration with Toddy Snyder dropping this month in the form of the new Olive Marlin seen here. The Marlin, in its current form, is frequently described as being inspired by the style of the Mad Men era. The AMC series started many menswear trends and the archives of sites like ours and many watch and menswear forums are ripe with stories about Mad Men’s watches, how to achieve the Don Draper look, and so on. Mad Men is on my mind right now though not because of the release of this new piece from Timex, but because of the quite hysterical gaffe made by someone at HBO Max, who inadvertently put up uncut and unedited versions of the show when it made its HBO Max streaming premiere on the first of the month. This was supposed to be a big moment for the debut of the new 4K scans of the show, but instead, everyone is talking about a puke hose.
I’m not the biggest Mad Men guy out there, but I like the show well enough, and I watched a few of my favorite episodes over the weekend to test the waters on a full rewatch. Maybe I’ll report back on that, at some point. For now, I can say that the style of the show (not just the clothes, but entire production design) remains just about perfect at evoking a very specific era, and the watches always played a major role in that. The Marlin would have felt right at home on this set.
For this new Todd Snyder collaboration, the dial has been given a coat of the designer’s “Snyder Olive” tone. It’s a deep green, complemented nicely by polished silver hands and applied hour markers. Like all Marlins, there’s a simplicity to this dial that draws you in. The green colorway is perhaps not the most vintage-accurate choice, but that’s fine. Sometimes a watch like this will read a bit more modern even though at a surface level it wears the costume of something from the middle part of the century.
The case measures 38mm in diameter, which is a great versatile size that just about everyone can wear. Again, not necessarily the most accurate sizing for a true vintage throwback (it really could be 2-3mm smaller for the full vintage effect) but it gets the broad strokes right, including a beautifully domed acrylic crystal that I think is the secret sauce for the Marlin in evoking the feel of a midcentury dress watch. It’s powered by a reliable, automatic Miyota movement (visible through the caseback and with a Timex wordmark on the rotor), and is paired with a brown leather strap with crocodile-style embossing.
The Marlin is one of those watches that has been around for long enough now that it’s easy to kind of take it for granted, but I think when you zoom out it’s actually a fairly important watch in the ongoing story of the enthusiast watch world, and for Timex as a brand specifically. These are affordable mechanical watches with a lot class and style that will always look nice and are impervious to trends across the rest of the industry. Todd Snyder’s touch here adds another fun design element in the color choice.
The new Todd Snyder x Timex Olive Marlin has a retail price of $279 and is available through the Timex and Todd Snyder websites, as well as all Todd Snyder retail locations. Timex
