Nomos Glashütte’s Club Campus line is elite in-house
watchmaking for the next generation of collectors.
By Elizabeth Doerr
Produced by Watch Journal in Partnership with Nomos Glashütte.
Nomos Glashütte is the modern gold standard for good taste in wristwear for an up-and-coming generation of watch wearers. And hardly any other line screams young and fresh as loudly as the Club, which was introduced in 2007 in the brand’s home market as the “watch for graduation.” Just one year later, the Club arrived in versions that were flatter, sportier, more elegant, and—yes—a bit more adult-looking. Even so, the Club remains the young, sporty, fresh version of the typical Nomos Glashütte watch to this day.
The latest version of the Club is a youthfully designed watch called Campus, a word that instantly reminds us of college, university, and new beginnings. And this is no accident – the Club continues to make for a great graduation gift, a reminder of a special time of life, a lasting memento to mark that moment you heard you got that new job or the day your significant other pledged to marry you. The Club Campus is ready for anything you are—whoever you are.
Fresh Design
The size of the new Nomos Glashütte Club Campus hits the sweet spot for the modern watch wearer, both making it easy to wear and ensuring that it will remain classically wearable for years to come. Nomos does not pigeonhole its watches strictly for men or for women; they are all in fact designed as unisex timepieces whatever their size (and all wear great on any wrist, male or female, as this author can attest from personal experience). This has been the case since the very day the first watches hit the market in 1992, long before it became trendy to avoid gender-labeling watches. The new stainless-steel Campus comes in three designs and two sizes for a great fit whatever your preference or wrist size may be: 36 x 8.17 mm (Club Campus) or 38.5 x 8.45 mm (Club 38 Campus Nacht and Club 38 Campus).
But the freshest element is certainly the Nomos Glashütte take on the California dial, a first for the German manufacture. This dial design, which is not very common in the history of watch design as a whole, encompasses half of the numerical markers as Arabic numerals (10 to 2 o’clock) and the other half Roman numerals (4 to 8 o’clock). The markings at 3, 5, 7, and 9 o’clock are dashes, while there is no marking at all at 6 o’clock as the design of the subsidiary seconds dial with its neon orange second hand lays claim to that space. A reddish orange is repeated on the other dial markings as an outline for the powdery blue-gray Super-LumiNova on the light-dialed Club Campus. The color scheme of the Club 38 Campus Nacht and Club 38 Campus are of course slightly different, for one thanks to the dark dial and the profuse use of Super-LumiNova on the “night” model: the orange second hand remains in the spotlight as the only real splash of color.
The Club 38 Campus Nacht—an homage to those long nights of studying (or partying)—is altogether an exercise in Nomos Glashütte experimenting with a few newer elements: first and foremost the extreme luminosity of the dial. Lume is not a material that Nomos generally employs in abundance. The Club 38 Campus Nacht (“Nacht” means “night” in German) is only the second instance of its use by this brand, the other being the Ahoi sports watch.
Overall, the Nomos Glashütte Club does not exhibit a derivative design—these watches are uniquely the brand’s own—and even this California dial is not derivative of existing vintage and modern examples, but rather goes its own way. Just like this brand usually does.
Movement Technology Made in Glashütte
It is truly a shame that the owner cannot see the lovely manually wound alpha caliber inside the new Nomos Glashütte Club Campus, but the comforting consolation is that Nomos Glashütte offers free engraving on the case back, easily accomplished by a simple form on the website to be filled out by the retailer or consumer, which provides the new owner with the opportunity to own something entirely unique.
The Alpha Caliber is a movement wholly made by Nomos Glashütte in Germany, chiefly utilizing components it makes on the premises with the odd Swiss-sourced element such as the Nivarox balance spring and bearing jewels. It is an ultraflat movement measuring a mere 2.6 mm in height—one of the big reasons that all watches by Nomos Glashütte make for such great daily wears—and boasts a 43-hour power reserve. This movement can go for just about two days before you need to give your watch a fresh injection of energy via its winding crown.
Even though you can’t see it through this watch’s case back, you can still appreciate that, like all Nomos Glashütte movements, it is thoughtfully designed and finely finished with typical Glashütte elements such as rhodium plating over the very obvious Glashütte ribbing (which are like côtes de Genève, but applied at a different angle), an in-house three-quarter plate, a Glashütte-style click, sunburst decoration on the ratchet and crown wheels, countersunk tempered blue screws, and—not to be forgotten—the perlage style invented by Nomos Glashütte back in the dawn of the German watch Mecca’s rebirth, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Nomos Glashütte was also one of the first manufacturers to pay careful attention to its straps, and so it comes as no great surprise that the three new Club Campus variations are secured to the wrist by beautiful examples of fine, modern leather styles: the Club 38 Campus and Club 38 Campus Nacht include gorgeous anthracite-colored velour leather straps, while the slightly more petite Club Campus has a gray velour leather strap. All of these are soft to the touch and durable in wear.
With a water resistance of 100 meters, this is a robust watch that can be taken pretty much anywhere off campus.
Further information can be found here: campus.nomos-store.com