Whenever I see the words “two-tone” come screaming across my inbox I wince just a little bit. I feel like for as long as I’ve been interested in watches, people have been trying to tell me that two-tone is coming back. Sometimes I’ve wondered if there are people in the industry whose entire job is to publicly speculate on the status of two-tone among the larger watch collecting set. I tend to think that there’s so much conversation about whether or not it’s coming back, nobody would even notice if it arrived. So that’s the headspace I was in when I glanced at the latest press release from G-SHOCK, which heralded the arrival of the Two-Tone Utility Color Series.
It turns out that these watches aren’t really what you’d normally think of in a two-tone conversation. They are quite literally multi-toned, meaning they incorporate both the traditional black resin cases found across the G-SHOCK line with brown integrated straps (with dial accents in complementary shades of green and yellow, for the most part). So two-tone, in your grandpa’s Datejust sense of the term, is a misnomer here. Digging further into the press release, though, I found another buzzword heard less often in the watch community: “Gorpcore”.
Just for the hell of it, I decided to apply some statistical analysis here to see if gorpcore in the watch world is something I’ve simply missed out on. I searched for the term in my email, and retrieved exactly two hits. The first, of course, was the press release for the G-SHOCKs seen here. The second was a marketing email sent from StockX in 2023 telling me that the popular fashion trend from 2017 is expected to be reflected in new sneakers soon. Did I miss that? It’s certainly quite possible I did, but StockX never tried to let me know about it again.
What is gorpcore? A valid question, and one that I’m now, after a few minutes on Wikipedia, prepared to answer. Gorpcore is a trend in fashion in which outerwear, often technical in nature and designed for outdoor recreation, is worn as streetwear. Now the question becomes: am I gorpcore? I live in New Hampshire, folks. I’ve been known to wear puffer jackets by Patagonia and North Face in situations where I’m not scaling a mountain (I never scale mountains, actually).
My gorpcore identity, such as it is, is a topic for another day. Let’s get back to the watches. The five models include references GA110TU-1A5, DW6900TU-1A5, GX56TU-1A5, GA710TU-1A3 and GA100TU-1A3, and borrow from the color blocking designs that are a defining characteristic of the gorpcore trend. Regardless of your feelings on two-tone, gorpcore, or any other term that is being used primarily to sell you stuff, I think these watches look rather nice. There’s something vaguely less aggressive about them than a standard G-SHOCK where black dominates, and they’re more sober than the brand’s many wildly colorful options. They’re a happy medium, in other words, and the series offers a nice variety of G-SHOCK models to choose from, including the triple-graph equipped DW6900 and the large case version of the GA700.
The new Two-Tone Utility Color Series is available now. Prices start at $110. G-SHOCK
