Color in watchmaking tends to live on the dial and stop there. With the Orbit Midnight Purple, Armin Strom had a different idea. The midnight purple fumé dial, a colorway with deep roots in the brand’s history and inherited from Armin Strom himself, now bleeds through into the movement, where a frosted midnight purple main plate picks up the hue and runs with it. The dial shifts from a vivid purple core to darker edges, and that same sense of depth carries right through the sapphire crystal to the mechanics below, where rhodium-coated components and hand-finished finger bridges sit against the purple ground in sharp relief.
The 43.4mm stainless steel case is framed by a black ceramic bezel and finished with a fully integrated stainless steel bracelet, which gives the whole thing a solidity that feels right for this kind of color choice. Hand-polished steel hands made in-house are filled with Super-LumiNova, the applied hour markers glow in the dark, and the numerals at 12 and 6 are carved from solid Super-LumiNova blocks. Inside, the manufacture Calibre ASS20 carries the world’s first on-demand date display on a ceramic bezel. Press the pusher at 10 o’clock and the date hand moves from its resting position at 12 to point at the current date on the bezel, advances at midnight on its own, and retreats discreetly with a second press. The Equal Force Barrel keeps things running consistently across a 72-hour power reserve.
Through the sapphire crystal and the caseback, the finishing tells its own story. Hand-polished bevels, perlage, and circular graining cover every surface, and the openworked layout puts the column-wheel mechanism and micro-rotor on full display from the dial side. The purple mainplate and fumé dial pull the whole composition together, with the contrast between the purple ground and rhodium-coated parts adding real depth to the architecture. Every watch is assembled twice. Limited to 20 pieces worldwide.
