There’s a photograph of Steve McQueen on the set of Le Mans in 1971 that every watch person knows. He’s wearing a square-cased chronograph on his left wrist – the TAG Heuer Monaco reference 1133B, blue dial, white subdials – and he looks like he invented cool. He didn’t invent the Monaco. But he made it mean something, and in the fifty-five years since that photo was taken, very few watches have carried that kind of cultural weight quite so effortlessly.
TAG Heuer know what they have. Which is why, when they show up to the world’s most important watch fair and announce not one but two new Monacos, you pay attention.
The Watch You’ll Actually Wear
The Monaco Chronograph is, on the surface, a refinement. Don’t let that word fool you – refining something this iconic is harder than inventing something new.
This new generation goes straight back to the blueprint – the original 1969 reference 1133 – and uses it as a design bible. The architectural sharpness that made that watch so radical is back and fully present. Angular. Purposeful. The crystal is closer to a true square. The edges bite. The 39mm case is grade 5 titanium, which means lighter on the wrist and tougher than it looks, and the caseback has been completely redesigned around one question: how does this feel after eight hours on your wrist? The answer is very good indeed.
Inside, the new Calibre TH20-11 is the most significant movement upgrade the Monaco Chronograph has ever received – fully in-house, 80-hour power reserve, bi-compax layout with the date at six. The layout directly references the original Calibre 11. The name TH20-11 is a wink if you know, irrelevant if you don’t.
Three versions. The blue is the right one – the McQueen dial, the Le Mans dial, the one that works everywhere from the paddock to the boardroom without asking anyone’s permission. The British Racing Green is genuinely gorgeous, a deep sunray-brushed dial with the firm confidence of someone who doesn’t need to explain their choices. The black with rose gold case furniture is the dinner option – two-tone in a way that feels thought through rather than try-hard.
The One That Changes Things
The Monaco Evergraph is not a watch story. It’s a mechanics story that happens to live inside a very beautiful watch. To understand why it matters, you need to understand something about how chronographs – stopwatch functions built into a wristwatch – have worked for the past 150 years.
Every chronograph ever made uses the same basic architecture: a system of levers, springs, and a column wheel that control when the stopwatch starts, stops, and resets. It’s brilliant engineering. Gérard Berthoud developed versions of it in the 18th century. It hasn’t fundamentally changed since. Until now.
TAG Heuer spent five years – five years – with their in-house LAB team and movement specialists Vaucher Manufacture Fleurier building a chronograph mechanism that works on entirely different principles. Instead of those traditional levers and springs, the Calibre TH80-00 uses two flexible bistable components. They don’t pivot. They don’t slide. They flex – bending at a microscopic level to trigger the start, stop, and reset functions with a precision that traditional mechanisms physically cannot match. The ten-thousandth push of the button feels identical to the first. No wear, drift, or degradation. Just the same crisp, satisfying action, forever.
That is not a marketing claim, it is a legitimately new solution to a problem that has existed since watchmaking began.
The watch around this mechanism is designed to show it off. The transparent dial puts the inverted movement – barrel, gear train, carbon-based oscillator – on full display from the front. Two sweeping architectural bridges frame the whole thing. Sharp faceted case edges give it a weight and presence that borders on brutalist sculpture. It’s 40mm of grade 5 titanium: natural with blue accents (the McQueen nod), or blacked-out DLC with red (the Formula 1 version of the same watch). COSC-certified. 70-hour power reserve. Five-year warranty.
Between these two watches, TAG Heuer have made a complete argument. The Chronograph says: we make beautiful, wearable, properly powered everyday watches. The Evergraph says: we also know how to rewrite the rules of the complication we’ve spent 165 years obsessing over.
The Monaco is more than half a century old, and it’s never felt this alive.
