Tissot Heritage Visodate Review: This Retro Revival Is Getting Harder To Find

Tissot traces its long history back to 1853, when it was founded in Switzerland’s Jura Mountains by the father-son watchmaking team of Charles-Félicien and Charles-Émile Tissot.  Today part of the Swatch Group, Tissot can lay claim to several watchmaking milestones throughout its history, including the first pocket watch to display two time zones in 1853; the first watch built to resist magnetism, the Antimagnetique, in 1930; and the first tactile-screen multifunction digital watch, the T-Touch, in 1999, years before the smartwatch would come into existence. Today, Tissot markets more than 4 million watches per year to more than 160 countries and is known for producing what its parent group terms “midrange market” watches that are prized for their price-to-value ratio. All that said, one of the venerable company’s milestones goes largely unacknowledged, or at least it did until recently, with the revival of the pioneering Tissot Heritage Visodate Automatic and Powermatic 80 watch. 

The Tissot Visodate Revival 

The original Tissot Visodate hit shelves in 1953, marking 100 years since Tissot’s founding. It was not the first wristwatch with a date display in a window — that would be, as most watch historians will already know, the trend-setting Rolex Datejust, which debuted in 1945 — but it was the first watch in which the date disk shifted to the next day’s numeral instantaneously at midnight rather than gradually. Rolex didn’t add this functionality to the Datejust until 1955, two years after the Visodate’s introduction (and then followed it up in 1956 with the aptly named Day-Date model, which was the first watch with both the day and the date displayed on the dial). From both an aesthetic and utility standpoint, the Visodate was emblematic of watch styles of the 1950s, an era during which the line between genteel dress watches and sturdy “everyday” sport and tool watches had started to blur. Thus, it should not be surprising that Tissot would opt to revive the model (above and below) in the 21st Century as part of its Heritage collection, which is composed of modern-day reissues of significant timepieces from the brand’s impressive and far-reaching archives. 

In 2010, Tissot introduced the first Heritage Visodate, which set the stage for all the variations that would follow. The watch had a 40mm case in stainless steel, with a thickness of 11.6mm, a somewhat substantial upsizing from the 34.5mm case of the 1953 originals, a decision certainly made with contemporary audiences in mind. The vintage, italic-font Tissot logo at 12 o’clock was a visual tip-off to the model’s midcentury roots, along with the sharply angled Dauphine hands and the thin, trapezoidal hour indexes that evoke the time period. The prominent, dual day-date window, rather than the simple date window of the vintage piece, offered a nod to modernity. And while the details on the movements in those 1950s models are rather scarce — some sources point to the manually wound Tissot Caliber 27B-621 as the engine of choice — the Heritage Visodate initially housed an ETA 2836-2, a self-winding workhorse with hacking seconds, 25 jewels, a 28,800-vph frequency, and a decent but not spectacular 38-hour power reserve. This first generation of Tissot Heritage Visodates would give way to an upgraded series (which we delve into below) that expanded the case dimensions,  incorporated the much more robust Powermatic 80 movement, and an expanded palette of dial options. 

Tissot Visodate Automatic Review

The 316L stainless steel case of the most recent Heritage Visodate models buck recent trends with their 42mm case diameter, a full 2mm larger than their predecessors. The case profile is also just a tad thicker, at just over 12mm high. Lug to lug, the case spans 49mm, extended a bit from the 47mm of the 2010 model. Contributing to the case’s relatively prominent silhouette on the wrist is the domed contours of the scratch-resistant sapphire crystal. The fluted crown is small and set close to the case, with a push-pull action rather than a more secure screw-down design; hence the water resistance is a shallow 30 meters, which most will find acceptable for a dress watch. The caseback snaps on and features a sapphire window to show off the movement inside. 

Tissot Visodate Automatic Dial 

The dials of the Powermatic 80-equipped models are virtually indistinguishable from those of the first Heritage releases in 2010. Their slightly convex shape mirrors the curve of the sapphire crystal for an intriguing sense of depth. The wide, faceted Dauphine hour and minute hands and trapezoidal hour markers, holdovers from the original 1953 Visodate as well as the recent, smaller-cased 2010 revival, are still present, along with the javelin-like, central sweep-seconds hand and the delicately framed, faceted day-date window at 3 o’clock. The date wheel of this blue-dialed model in our photographs isn’t exactly color-matched, as it features white numerals on a black (not blue) background, but it is less jarring than the black-on-white date disks that Tissot wisely uses on the models with white or silver opaline dials. 

Distinguishing the recently launched Powermatic 80 models from their predecessors are a handful of understated details. The “Visodate” text, which was in a standard all-caps, sans-serif font on the earlier models and placed directly beneath the applied vintage Tissot logo at 12 o’clock, now appears in a charmingly retro cursive font and has been moved to a position above the 6 o’clock marker. The “Automatic” script that occupied that spot on the previous models has been replaced by the more descriptive (and, let’s face it, more impressive) “Powermatic 80.” 

Tissot Visodate Automatic Movement

As noted above, the Heritage Visodate joined the Tissot lineup in 2010, just a year before ETA, provider of the original models’s 2836 caliber and a sister company of Tissot within the Swatch Group, began work on a more elite automatic caliber for its “midrange” tier of luxury watchmakers, which includes Tissot as well as stalwarts like Longines, Hamilton, Rado, and Mido. The caliber that emerged from this initiative is the movement that Tissot started putting inside the Heritage Visodate starting in 2020, concurrently with rolling out the new case diameter — the now-ubiquitous Powermatic 80. Based on the workhorse ETA 2824, whose power reserve is a pedestrian 38 hours, the Powermatic 80 derives its numerical name from its uncommonly lengthy 80-hour power reserve, a "weekend-proof" range far longer than that offered by comparable movements in comparably priced watches.

To achieve this remarkable feat, ETA’s engineers reduced the base caliber’s consumption of energy by reducing the frequency of its oscillations from 4 Hz (28,800) to 3 Hz (21,600 vph), and added a friction-reducing synthetic material to the escapement. They also added a Nivachron hairspring for enhanced performance and shrunk the diameter of the barrel arbor’s core to allow for a stretched mainspring and thus a longer running autonomy. The rotor is etched with the same retro Tissot logo as the dial, and is on display, along with the rest of the movement’s decorations, through a transparent sapphire caseback.

Tissot Visodate Automatic Bracelet and Strap

The Heritage Visodate featured in most of this article’s photos doubles down on the “Fifties Retro” vibe with its use of a Milanese-style steel mesh bracelet. Identifiable by its series of small metal wires woven into a mesh pattern, this type of bracelet (some would actually classify it as more of a strap) derives its name from a technique perfected in 19th-century Milan and is, at least in theory, more adjustable in much smaller increments than other bracelets thanks to its lack of individual links and the presence of a lockable clasp that can be disengaged and moved along its length. Style-wise, Milanese bracelets can be dressed up or down, and can look either vintage or contemporary — an ideal choice, many might agree, for a watch that was always meant to be both “dressy” and “everyday.” Of course, along with the array of dial options, Tissot also offers several strap alternatives, including black and brown alligator-scale cowhide leather.

Final Thoughts And Price

The Tissot Heritage Visodate is getting harder and harder to find on the market these days, though they pop up every now and then. They are still available in several Tissot markets but the US seems to not be getting many in stock. Still, the ~$700 price is a really solid value if you can get your hands on one and even if not, the secondary market has a lot of options for you. You can learn more over at tissotwatches.com