The Unintended Icon
Nobody planned any of this. The truck was designed for war. The watch was designed for racing. The hotel was a café that accepted paintings when the artists couldn’t pay. The jacket was made for North Sea fishermen. At some point, the world caught up with all of them. This issue is about what happens when something is made so correctly, for such a specific purpose, that it becomes impossible to ignore.
Mercedes-Benz G-Class / Puch Geländewagen, 1979
The Geländewagen was commissioned in 1972 at the request of the Shah of Iran, who needed a military vehicle for the Imperial Iranian Ground Forces. Mercedes-Benz partnered with Steyr-Puch of Graz, Austria to develop it. The Shah was overthrown in 1979 before a single vehicle was delivered. By then, the vehicle existed. Mercedes-Benz decided to sell it anyway.
The Puch G, the Austrian-built version, assembled in Graz by Steyr-Puch, went first to military customers. The Austrian armed forces. The Argentine army. Border patrol agencies across Europe. Then to a small number of civilians who needed to go places other vehicles couldn’t.
Nobody designed it to become the most recognizable vehicle on Rodeo Drive. They designed it to ford rivers and climb gradients where other vehicles would stall. The body-on-frame construction, the three differential locks, the ladder frame, the external door hinges, the spare tire bolted to the outside of the tailgate. None of this was added for aesthetic reasons. It was added because the vehicle was designed to work in conditions where nothing else would.
The door hinges are still on the outside. The spare tire is still on the tailgate. The lock switches for the three differentials are still in a row on the dash. Nothing has changed because nothing needed to.
The modern G63 AMG has 577 horsepower, a twin-turbo V8, a nine-speed automatic, and massaged leather seats. It costs approximately $160,000. It will carry six people in considerable comfort while climbing a forty-degree incline. It is the furthest possible thing from what the vehicle was designed to be, and it is also the best-selling configuration.
The Puch G is the one worth finding. Built between 1979 and 1990 in Graz, available in petrol and diesel, with perhaps 90 horsepower and no power steering. Designed for military and agricultural use. Now worth, in preserved original condition, more than a new G63.
What to look for
The 280GE (2.8L petrol) or 240GD (diesel) are the most common configurations. Frame rust is the primary concern: inspect the sills, floor, and crossmembers carefully. Parts availability is reasonable but requires a specialist. Find one with documented history. Avoid anything modified toward comfort at the expense of originality. The market for correct early examples has moved significantly in the last five years and will continue to.
The Watch
Omega Speedmaster Professional, 1957
In September 1964, Deke Slayton, Chief of the Astronaut Office, sent an internal memo. NASA needed a chronograph. Accurate, durable, capable of operating in conditions that had never existed for any consumer product.
James Ragan, a young NASA engineer, issued a formal request for quotation to approximately ten watch manufacturers. Four responded: Omega, Rolex, Longines-Wittnauer, and Hamilton.
Hamilton disqualified itself on arrival. They sent a pocket watch. Not a chronograph wristwatch. A pocket watch. Nobody is certain whether this was a misunderstanding of the brief or a misunderstanding of what the brief implied. It was the last time Hamilton was part of the conversation.
Testing ran from October 21, 1964 to March 1, 1965. Eleven tests. Temperature extremes from -18 to +93 degrees Celsius. Thermal shock, rapid cycling between those extremes. Humidity at 95 percent for 48 hours. Vacuum equivalent to 200,000 feet altitude. Oxygen atmosphere at high pressure. Six shock impacts of 40 Gs in six different directions. Vibration. Acoustic noise at 130 decibels for 30 minutes.
The Rolex stopped running twice during the humidity test. When it reached the high temperature test, the sweep second hand warped and began binding against the other hands on the dial.
The Longines-Wittnauer crystal warped under heat and physically disengaged from the case.
The Omega passed every test. On March 1, 1965, Ragan signed the certification. The Speedmaster was declared flight-qualified for all manned space missions. Gus Grissom and John Young wore the first certified examples on Gemini 3, three weeks later.
What most people know: Neil Armstrong wore a Speedmaster during Apollo 11. What most people get wrong: Armstrong left his in the lunar module as a backup timer when the onboard clock failed. It was Aldrin who wore his on the surface. The photograph above is Buzz Aldrin, July 20, 1969. Shot by Armstrong.
Apollo 13, 1970. The ship lost power after an oxygen tank exploded two days in. Computers offline. Navigation offline. The crew had to execute a precise engine burn to correct their trajectory and return to Earth. They timed it on their Speedmasters. Fourteen seconds, by hand, with a watch bought through a standard government procurement order.
Omega did not design the Speedmaster to be the most important watch in history. They designed it to be a racing chronograph in 1957. NASA found it in a Houston jewelry store seven years later and gave it a different assignment.
The Hotel
La Colombe d’Or, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France
Paul Roux opened a café in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in 1920. The village was small and the café was simple. The artists who came to the south of France in the 1920s needed somewhere to eat and sometimes somewhere to sleep. Roux had rooms.
Picasso came. Then Matisse. Then Braque, Léger, Miró, Calder, Chagall. They ate Provençal food and they didn’t always have money, and Roux took their paintings in exchange for meals and rooms. Nobody considered this an investment strategy. It was a practical arrangement between a café owner and his customers.
The paintings are still on the walls. They have not been sold. The family has been offered significant sums. They have declined. The walls of La Colombe d’Or are now estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The restaurant still serves roughly the same Provençal menu it served in the 1920s. The same family runs it, the fourth generation now.
There are 25 rooms. The pool has a Calder mobile at one end — visible in the photograph above. A Léger mosaic covers one wall of the terrace. A Braque is in the dining room. A Matisse is in the bar.
La Colombe d’Or does not advertise. It does not have a loyalty program. It has not expanded. It has not opened a second property. It became one of the great small hotels in the world because Paul Roux was hospitable to artists who didn’t have money. That was not a brand strategy.
The Jacket
Barbour, South Shields, England, est. 1894
John Barbour opened a shop in South Shields in 1894, on the northeast English coast, supplying working clothes to fishermen, farmers, and sailors. The wax cotton construction came from oiled canvas that sailors had worn for decades, treated to shed water, built for cold and wind off the North Sea.
The company supplied the British armed forces with wax cotton suits in both World Wars. After the wars, they returned to making jackets for people who worked outdoors, which is what they had always done.
The Beaufort jacket was introduced in 1980. It is still in production, unchanged.
At some point in the late 1970s, the British countryside set discovered it. Then the royal family. Then it received a royal warrant. Then everyone else. The Barbour is now worn by people who have never been near a farm, a fishing boat, or the North Sea. It has appeared in fashion weeks. In film. In neighborhoods John Barbour would not have recognized.
None of this changed the jacket. You can still send yours back to South Shields to be rewaxed.
It became what it is not because anyone decided it should be fashionable, but because it was made correctly and continued to be made correctly for a hundred years, and eventually the world caught up with it.
An Iranian Shah who never got his truck. Four watches in a Houston test facility. A café owner who took paintings as payment. A jacket for North Sea fishermen. See you next issue.