Hautlence’s $165K Retrovision ’64 Is a Star Trek Communicator Strapped to Your Wrist

While we always look forward to Watches and Wonders, it’s safe to say that 2026 was mostly a year of playing it safe. The watch community pretty much agreed that Rolex phoned in its anniversary, most of the independents stayed in their lanes, and a lot of the big names seemed content to tweak the formula rather than break it.

Then Hautlence showed up with the Retrovision ’64 – a watch shaped like the communicator Captain Kirk used to call the Enterprise, complete with a flip-top grille and a flying tourbillon spinning underneath. It’s ridiculous for sure, but perhaps in the best possible way.

A Communicator You Can Wind

The Retrovision ’64 is the third entry in Hautlence’s Concepts line, following the radio-inspired ’47 from 2024 and the robot-themed ’85 from last year. The pattern is clear: take a pop-culture artifact from a specific decade and rebuild it as a working mechanical watch.

This time the reference point is 1960s sci-fi, and the execution is pretty spot-on. The case measures 61.2 x 41.8 x 15.6mm in Grade 5 titanium, sandblasted and finished in brown PVD with red gold PVD trim on the hinged flip cover. That cover is punched through with a grid of tiny holes mimicking a speaker grille, and the crown sits at 12 o’clock with a green ring accent that nods straight to the original prop’s toggle.

Flip The Cover, Reveal The Theater

Under the grille is where things get really interesting, with two separate sapphire crystals covering two completely different displays. The round one up top frames a minutes dial finished in green, orange, and white lacquer with Globolight numerals, tracked by a single skeletonized orange hand. Below it, a rectangular crystal covers a linear hour track built into the case itself, with orange-lacquered numerals and an arrow indicator that snaps back to the start of the line once it reaches the end.

For the uninitiated, that snap-back motion is what’s called a retrograde jump, and pulling it off on a linear track rather than an arc is pretty impressive engineering to say the least.

The Flying Tourbillon Cameo

The center of the minutes dial is cut away, exposing a one-minute flying tourbillon with a double hairspring working in plain view. It’s the kind of complication that would usually be the whole story in a $165K watch, but here it’s almost a supporting character to the communicator gag.

The D50 automatic movement driving everything has 239 components, 39 jewels, runs at 21,600 vph, and holds a 72-hour power reserve. The linear jumping-hour module was developed with Agenhor, the Geneva-based specialists Hautlence has worked with since debuting this mechanism on its Linear line back in 2022.

Spec Sheet

Pricing & Availability

Priced at CHF 129,700 before tax (roughly $165,000 USD) and capped at just three examples worldwide, the Retrovision ’64 is functionally unobtainable for (almost) anyone reading this – but it’s still a fun design exercise to appreciate.