Sep­tem­ber with its balmy nights and Indian sum­mer days will bring more than a change of sea­son to The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Museum of Art in New York; there will be a whole new way to do time there. Refined, dis­tinc­tive watches with a Parisian flair or tra­di­tional Eng­lish faces will be the focus of the Met Shop’s newest col­lec­tion. Michael Nash, Man­ager of Repro­duc­tion Jew­elry, is an avid col­lec­tor of watches and told me that he wanted to bring all those bespoke details to the col­lec­tion. While I find all of the designs well-executed and hand­some, the only cri­tique I would offer is that the women’s watches are man­u­fac­tured with Asian move­ments while the men’s have bet­ter qual­ity Swiss. Yes, women can be fickle, espe­cially when it comes to fash­ion watches, or jew­elry in gen­eral. And I do under­stand that keep­ing these time­pieces within cer­tain price points is part of a plan that of course ben­e­fits the con­sumer. How­ever there are many of us for whom qual­ity is impor­tant and a Swiss move­ment would be fur­ther incen­tive to make the purchase.

The watches pos­sess a strong vin­tage expres­sion that is tran­si­tional (mean­ing that the designs ride a com­fort­able style wave between old and con­tem­po­rary). This makes them wear­able for day as well as evening.