“The 1960s is something unique,” said Eugenia Paulicelli, founder and director of the Fashion Studies Program at the Graduate Center of City University of New York. “It has its own aura of excitement, and this explosion of the youth culture, of music, politics, human rights, Vietnam, etc.”

Watchmaking went through its own rebellion then, too, leaving behind the bulkier and curved designs of the 1950s in favor of sleek and angular time-only watches with their less-is-more dials; professional-grade diving watches in bright colors; and racing chronographs that often had color-contrast subdials, a style the industry called “panda,” in reference to the color-contrast bear. The decade was, the freelance designer and artist Guy Bove said, “the beginning of watches that look more like today.”

Some of those features have never disappeared. But recently watches from brands like Breitling, Grand Seiko, TAG Heuer and Omega have taken on even more retro flair.

“It makes sense to go back to the first editions, which has something essential about them, before they were diluted by decades of changes,” Mr. Bove said.

The elegance of the early ’60s has long attracted Anders Bergstrom, a Swedish industrial designer who has been a watch collector for 30 years, focusing on the ’60s and ’50s.

“When I was 12, I got one of my first watches — a Seamaster 600,” he said. And even though Mr. Bergstrom’s collection now totals about 120 timepieces, that 1962 Omega is still one of his most treasured watches, in part because it highlights several of his favorite design developments from the decade, like thin indexes replacing Arabic numerals and thin cases with straight lines and faceted lugs replacing the chubby cases popular in the 1950s.

“The ’50s watches had more domed, kind of blown-up shapes, whereas the ’60s is more elegant — think early James Bond and cocktails,” Mr. Bergstrom said. (An example? His Patek Philippe 3410, a ’60s time-only predecessor of the Calatrava collection of today. “To me, this is the ultimate watch,” he said.)

Despite his collection’s focus, Mr. Bergstrom, a former car designer who now directs design for a sustainable materials manufacturer, does keep an eye on brands’ introductions. “In recent years I have seen more and more ’60s references,” he said. “Not only in high end — you also see it in Daniel Wellington and other cheap watches that, for instance, combine the round with the flat and use indexes rather than numbers.”

Watches and Cars

Stefano Macaluso, a watch designer and car expert, said the connection between watches and cars had developed over time. “And in the 1960s, so many people were involved in motorsports, and the drivers needed wristwatch chronographs,” he said. “So, this generation of classical chronographs came about because of the popularity of motorsport. It was not only marketing; it was a need.”

In collaboration with the Fondazione Gino Macaluso, Mr. Macaluso was recently a curator of “The Golden Age of Rally,” an exhibition that runs until May 2 at the National Car Museum in Turin, Italy. (Gino Macaluso, who died in 2010, was the owner of Sowind Group, the holding company for Girard-Perregaux and Daniel JeanRichard at the time, as well as a well-known motor racing driver and enthusiast.)

“Around one-third of the cars are from the 1960s, and the exhibition also includes several watches,” Stefano Macaluso said. “For instance, some Girard-Perregaux watches designed by my father, alongside TAG Heuer chronographs.” He now is working on several ’60s-influenced limited edition watches, but said nondisclosure agreements prohibited him from discussing them.

“Today the perception is — whether this is right or wrong — that the 1960s were the dream of creativity, a time where everything is possible,” he said, “and this also goes for fashion, and in cars, where you see this organic design, which you can call sexy.”

Echoes in Design

On Feb. 1, the re-edition of the 1960 Grand Seiko was introduced: the SBGW295 ($13,800), a limited edition of 500 pieces.

“In the ’60s,” Keiko Naruse, a senior manager in Seiko’s marketing communications office, wrote in an email, “it became more important for the entire watch design to reflect the high performance of the watch movement — its precision, durability and robustness. For Seiko, it was also in the ’60s that designing standards were reconsidered to allow finer shapes to be designed. Therefore, many of our designs today that are based on heritage reflect the design from the ’60s.”

The new timepiece, however, has contemporary changes. “While the overall design of the re-edition is faithful to the first Grand Seiko,” she wrote, “it has some updates such as a traditional urushi lacquer dial, maki-e indexes and adoption of a high-performance titanium alloy” for the case. (Maki-e is a traditional technique in which patterns are painted with lacquer and then given dimension with sprinkled layers of 24-karat gold powder.)

Christian Selmoni, style and heritage director at Vacheron Constantin, wants to turn the clock back even further. “To talk about the ’60s we must jump back to the ’50s,” he said. “This was an incredibly important decade, where the style shifted away from Art Deco and watches looking like pocket watches with lugs. This was a shift that was the beginning of the modern era — extremely elegant,” he said. “The ’60s was a continuation of this: more flamboyant, but still elegant.”

In February, the Geneva brand, which is 268 years old, released the panda-dial Overseas Chronograph 5500V/110A-B686 ($32,400). But to Mr. Selmoni, who said he had noticed a ’60s-inspired focus on sporty watches from other brands, the introduction had nothing to do with trends. “It is simply a very sophisticated expression of the panda dial,” he said.

At Breitling, a new panda dial marked Boeing’s retirement of the long-range, wide-body 747 — the last of the airplanes, introduced in 1969, left the factory in January.

Its Navitimer B01 Chronograph 43 Boeing 747 ($9,400) featured a cream-colored dial, black subdials, and red and white details, echoing the colors used on the original 747. “I like these kinds of cockpit-in-a-plane references in a watch,” Alessandra Cianchetta, the Italian architect, designer, urbanist and artist who now is teaching at the Yale School of Architecture. “They are the most striking.”

Ms. Cianchetta talked about the ’60s as a period of expansion, optimism in technology and social reforms. “You have to take this into context,” she said, “not just look at aesthetical design elements.”

For example, she said a sign of the ’60s influence in New York City was the 2019 hotel renovation of the TWA Flight Center at Kennedy International Airport, which was designed by the Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen and opened in 1962. (Coincidentally, the first commercial Boeing 747 flight took off in 1970 from the airport, bound for London.)

Since 2002, Mr. Bove, the freelance designer, has led design teams at, in sequence, IWC, Chopard, Breitling and TAG Heuer.

Most recently, in February, he left TAG Heuer, where the team had completed the silver and black panda-dial TAG Heuer Carrera Chronograph 60th Anniversary ($7,400), presented in January during LVMH Watch Days.

The anniversary watch was not a re-edition. For instance, the hand-wound movement was replaced with an automatic one, requiring the watch to be 14.55 millimeters thick rather than the original 12. And the diameter was increased to 39 millimeters from the original 36, to match today’s prevailing taste.

Mr. Bove said the current ’60s-inspired models from various brands weren’t just copies: “We are not revisiting the ’60s. We are revisiting legends that happened to come out in the ’60s.”

A Constant Revival

Doxa — founded in Switzerland in 1889 — is well known in the industry for its diving watches with colorful dials, which first appeared on the market in 1967, “when most other diving watches had blue or black dials,” said its chief executive, Jan Edöcs.

“But we were diving in Lake Neuchâtel, not on the Maldives. And when you go down to 30 meters [98.4 feet] in this lake, orange grants the best visibility,” he said. “So, Doxa’s dial colors are not about trends or fashion, the color had functionality — for me the ’60s is all about being functional.”

While some of Doxa’s current cases, with flat tops and bottoms and integrated bracelets, have had subtle evolutions, the SUB 300 Carbon ($3,890) introduced in 2021 had a radical one: Its case was made of forged carbon. “To me this is a perfect combo of bringing the past into the future,” Mr. Edöcs said. “This represents design aspects of the ’60s, but it is not a copy-paste from history books.”

Another diving watch heavily influenced by a 1960s model, the Vulcain Skindiver Nautique ($1,600) was released in January. Guillaume Laidet, a watch production strategist, had suggested that the Swiss brand Vulcain make the 38-millimeter model.

“The timepiece has every code of the ’60s original diving watch,” Mr. Laidet said, as well as an ETA- 2824 movement and a vertically brushed blue dial.

“Nineteen-sixties in general is a demand from collectors,” said Mr. Laidet, himself a vintage watch collector. “My first watches were a vintage chrono and an Omega Constellation, both from the 1960s. So yes, this decade is a personal taste.

“I drive an Alpina 110 — a re-edition of a ’60s car, and just look behind me,” he added with a laugh, leading my eye on the screen of our video call to a Roy Lichtenstein poster tacked to the wall of his home office.

Yet watchmaking’s focus on the past in the current crop of watches both pleases and frustrates Mr. Macaluso, the watch designer and car expert.

“Today we are in a constant post-something; today, we are in a constant revival of what happened 30, 40, 50 years ago,” he said. “We are kind of a time capsule where creativity about new, external design is very slow in terms of innovation, apart from a few independent watch brands.

”There is this feeling that if you create a new shape, it will not sell,” he added. “Today’s watches are beautiful, they are fantastic — but we live in the past.”

Ms. Cianchetta, the Italian architect, said that designers and artists always looked back at certain decades.

“But yes, there is a concentration of the ’60s now, which is much more powerful than any decades,” she said. “The 1960s had an impact that never went away.”