A BLOG TO WATCH

The vintage-inspired Rado Golden Horse 1957 is a throwback to one of the brand’s classic designs and succeeds by not straying too far from the original. Available in either a blue (as seen here) or green gradient dial, these 37mm-wide watches come on an old-school grains-of-rice bracelet and are limited to 1,957 pieces.

The dial is done with the same style indices, hands, red-date, and twin decorative golden seahorses, while the thick box-shaped sapphire crystal tops off the throwback vibes. The highly polished rhodium indices and dauphine hands would ordinarily send a chill down my spine from a photography point of view (let alone legibility) but the healthy double-sided anti-reflective coating goes a very long way.

The 37mm-wide and 10.8mm-thick case would ordinarily be a bit too small for me (though I’ve increasingly been appreciating sub-40mm watches as of late), but the 40.9mm lug-to-lug measurement confirms what I felt as I wore it. The Golden Horse is a smaller watch for sure, especially by contemporary standards, but the proportions make it look just right on my 7.5 inch wrist. I also think the bracelet does a lot for the watch in this regard, as the leather strap on the previous red-dial Golden Horse did make it wear smaller.

Speaking of which, the polished grains-of-rice bracelet is very well done. It looks, feels, and wears like a bracelet that costs more than the sub-$2,000 price of the Golden Horse. The high polish might be a scratch magnet down the road, but that’s not a consideration that substantively takes anything away from it. The brushed folding clasp is adorned with — you guessed it — two seahorses. Hats off to Rado for its execution of the bracelet.