2025 Rewind Magazine

The best writing and photography from the newsletter in 2025. A benefit only available to 2026 Founding Members. Subscribe to the Unpolished newsletter to become one today.  

Below I've published the introductory Letter from the Editor so you can get a feel for what's included in the 2025 Rewind Magazine. The images are renderings of the print magazine, which is still be finalized, but you can expect ~60 pages of perfect-bound photos and writing. 

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Letter from the Editor

On January 1, 2025, Unpolished had exactly zero paid subscribers. For starting from zero, we accomplished a lot this year. Thank you. Whether you’re an old or new subscriber, anything Unpolished has done is because of you. This “zine” is part thank you letter, part anthology. 

I love the email newsletter format. It’s somewhere between writing a long email to friends and a short essay—casual and friendly. In October, I also started reading them as “audio editions” to supplement the monthly podcast conversation, which some of you enjoy.

But it’s far from perfect. I’ve traveled from New York to Geneva to Miami to Glashütte this year to cover watches. I’m proud of so much of the writing and photography that’s resulted, and I didn’t want it to get lost to the archives. Our article about how hand finishing became the new complication has helped shift the conversation. For the Unpolished Index, our reviews that actually rate watches, I reviewed not one, but two Berneron Mirages. 

As I wrote earlier this year: There’s very little content that aspires to do anything more than perform well on its own platform. A good TikTok is one that gets a million views; a good YouTube is one that’s watched for a long time. 

But the best watch experiences can’t be captured by metrics. The beauty is in their seams, in the messy, mechanical gears. It’s why “hand-made” and “craftsmanship” have become buzzwords. The best watches—and the best writing about them—aren’t disposable. They’re meant to last, to be revisited years later. 

I decided to do this “2025 Rewind” while on vacation in late August. It made me ask this question for every newsletter: Is this something that I’d be proud to publish in a magazine? Of course, not every newsletter can—or should—be worthy of print. But it helped drive my focus in a different way. 

After that, I published an introduction to engraved enamel, which became relevant when a stainless steel Patek Philippe 1518 came up for auction in November. I got up close with that 1518 perpetual calendar chronograph, the most expensive watch to sell this year. 

I wasn’t quite ready to put all these watches behind me yet, and I hope you’re not either. 

In this Rewind, you’ll also find an essay on how to develop your own taste, along with 47 rules for collecting. There are photo reports from manufacturers in Glashütte and Geneva, and I dug through my photo archive to feature the best watches I saw in 2025—some new, some old.

This is 2025, the Unpolished way.