Timex is known for making extremely affordable watches that offer remarkable durability for the price. The Connecticut-based brand’s most famous slogan from its 170-year-and-counting run is “Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.”
Perhaps no watch in the Timex catalog better embodies this ethos than the Camper. First debuting in the 1980s as a dirt-cheap and disposable plastic-bodied field watch with a mechanical movement for the U.S. Army, the Camper soon became known as a utilitarian everyman watch for civilians thanks to its time spent on the wrist of Richard Dean Anderson’s MacGyver in the first few seasons of the titular 1980s action TV series.
Now, four decades later, popular menswear designer and accomplished Timex collaborator Todd Snyder has taken the bones of the Camper and created a stunning non-disposable dress watch that looks better suited for Don Draper’s wrist than MacGyver’s. Say hello to the The Todd Snyder x Timex MK-1 Amalfi.
The Camper goes glamping
The “Amalfi” really shares very little in common with the original camper. Outside of the hand-wound mechanical movement under the hood, the 36mm case size, the domed acrylic crystal and the general case shape, these are entirely different watches, with the Amalfi more closely resembling dress watches of the 1950s and ’60s than a 1980s field watch.
Gone is the printed 12-and-24-hour scale on the dial, replaced here by gold-tone applied indices that alternate between Arabic numerals and dagger-style markers. The sharpened leaf-shaped hands, also in polished gold-tone metal, are a far more elegant choice than the white fencepost hands of the original Camper. Then there’s the dial, which eschews the matte black of the original camper for a dressy cream-colored face.
