Objects Without Alibis: Giovanni Moro and the UNIMATIC Worldview.

Luxury has developed an anxiety about being ignored.

Contemporary watchmaking, in particular, now operates with the nervous energy of an industry terrified that silence might be mistaken for irrelevance. Every release arrives wrapped in mythology - military provenance inflated into cinema, engineering narrated like theology, nostalgia polished until it acquires the artificial sheen of memory rehearsed too many times. The modern luxury watch increasingly behaves less like an object than a performance of significance.

Which is precisely why UNIMATIC feels so unusual.

Not because the Milan-based watchmaker is louder, stranger or more technically theatrical than its contemporaries, but because it approaches design with an almost unfashionable degree of restraint. Its watches do not attempt seduction in the conventional sense. They do not plead to be admired. They simply exist with unusual clarity - as though every unnecessary gesture has been methodically removed until only proportion, texture, utility and atmosphere remain.

Founded in 2015 by industrial designers Giovanni Moro and Simone Nunziato, UNIMATIC emerged not from the traditional culture of horology, but from the intellectual ecosystem of Milanese industrial design. This distinction matters. Milan has long understood that the most enduring objects rarely announce themselves immediately. From the severe humanism of Enzo Mari to the disciplined wit of Achille Castiglioni, Italian design at its best has always treated reduction not as minimalism, but as ethics - the belief that objects should justify their existence through coherence rather than decoration.

UNIMATIC belongs unmistakably to this lineage.

Its watches feel less “styled” than edited. The typography, geometry and negative space carry the calm inevitability of something resolved through subtraction rather than addition. Even their most recognisable designs possess an unusual anonymity - not anonymous in the sense of being forgettable, but in the sense that good industrial objects often resist ego. They resemble instruments whose logic predates branding itself.

UNIMATIC Modello Cinque UT5-TANC: Somewhere between a toolwatch, a brutalist building, and a design thesis that accidentally became very cool.

The recently released UNIMATIC Modello Cinque UT5-TANC, developed alongside Nigel Cabourn and The Armoury, distils this philosophy with almost unsettling precision.

On paper, the watch presents itself as a compact expedition toolwatch: 36mm steel case, Cerakote coating, fixed monoblock bezel, proprietary anti-shock system, 300 metres of water resistance, MIL-STD-810H certification. Yet none of these specifications fully explain the peculiar emotional atmosphere the object generates in person.

What the UT5-TANC evokes is not adventure in the contemporary luxury sense - no fantasy of billionaire exploration or algorithmically curated ruggedness - but something older and more psychologically complex: the aesthetics of endurance. It recalls the material culture of mid-century polar expeditions, analogue surveying equipment, naval instrumentation and survival gear designed before functionality became a marketing genre. The stonewashed surfaces already appear weathered by use, as though the watch arrives carrying its own imagined history. The muted navy dial and faded military palette possess the tonal severity of Antarctic photography - all wind, distance, silence and compressed light.

The connection to Nigel Cabourn feels particularly apt here. Cabourn has long approached clothing less as fashion than as archaeological reconstruction - garments treated as living documents shaped by conflict, weather, labour and time. The UT5-TANC extends that sensibility into horology. It does not romanticise vintage military watches so much as reinterpret the philosophical conditions that produced them: necessity, resilience, clarity under pressure.

Even the decision to house the watch in a 36mm case feels quietly defiant. In an era where sports watches increasingly perform masculinity through sheer physical scale, the UT5-TANC instead recalls an older logic of proportion - when field equipment was designed around efficiency, wearability and prolonged use rather than symbolic aggression. The result is unexpectedly elegant. Not elegant in the polished Swiss sense, but in the way certain utilitarian objects become beautiful through complete fidelity to purpose.

This tension - between emotional atmosphere and industrial severity - is what makes UNIMATIC so compelling. The watches sit at an unusual intersection of cultures rarely allowed to overlap naturally: Milanese industrial design, underground fashion, military functionalism, graphic modernism, automotive romanticism and contemporary art. Collaborations with Hodinkee, Museum of Modern Art, Massena LAB and RUF Automobile have only reinforced the sense that UNIMATIC’s design language behaves almost architecturally - stable enough to absorb radically different references without losing its internal coherence.

Perhaps this is because the brand understands something many luxury companies no longer do: functionality itself can carry emotional weight. In The Craftsman, Richard Sennett describes how truly successful tools reveal their intelligence slowly through use rather than spectacle. UNIMATIC watches operate precisely this way. They become more persuasive through prolonged contact - through the feel of the crown between the fingers, the precise resistance of the bezel, the gradual familiarity that develops when an object continues to reward attention long after novelty has disappeared.

To speak with Giovanni Moro is to realise that none of this is accidental. The restraint, the geometry, the suspicion of excess, the almost architectural obsession with proportion - it all emerges from a worldview shaped equally by industrial design culture and a deep discomfort with contemporary luxury’s tendency toward self-parody.

What follows is therefore less a conventional founder interview than an extended conversation about reduction, permanence, utility, collaboration and the strange emotional afterlife of functional objects.

UNIMATIC feels guided by the conviction that the most enduring objects are often the most restrained. At what point does removing detail cease to be an act of simplification and become the creation of a distinct design language?

Giovanni Moro: I think from the very beginning, since this way of approaching product design is some form of a mindset. We apply this method and grammar since day one and we will keep going in this direction for the future development.

Your watches draw on well-established military and tool-watch archetypes, yet they never read as homage pieces. How do you identify the underlying principles worth preserving while stripping away everything that is merely decorative?

Giovanni Moro: We try to measure reality - and in this case, the state of the art in classical watch design - before trying to create an alternative one. This is very helpful for us not to fall into ornamentalism or come up with solutions that are “original” for the sake of being “original”.

It’s some form of alchemical sublimation: making old established, well-designed concepts condense into a newly crafted modern object.

Coming from industrial design rather than traditional horology, did you approach the wristwatch as a solved object to be refined, or as a format whose conventions were open to reinterpretation?

Giovanni Moro: As a solved object, bringing a lot of interesting constraints to face in every decision to take.

At the same time, the symbolic value of this product category gives the designer a way to follow many different paths - or better, to approach the multifaceted essence of the symbol from different angles. It can be deep and playful at the same time, and it’s one of the most exciting activities we carry on at UNIMATIC.

There is an unmistakably Milanese sensibility to UNIMATIC - rigorous, understated and deeply attentive to proportion. How has Italy’s design culture shaped your understanding of what constitutes timelessness?

Giovanni Moro: I agree, and I think that for better and worse UNIMATIC is unmistakably Italian, and Milanese, in its way of approaching both the product and people.

It’s of course a very natural way for both the company and the persons, since we are working daily within the Milan environment even if some of us - including Simone and me - were not born and raised here. Still, we were accepted and, to some degree, formed by the city in which we operate.

The watches are highly functional, yet their appeal is also profoundly emotional. How do you balance utility with the quieter, more instinctive qualities that cause an object to become personally significant over time?

Giovanni Moro: I think utility itself carries symbolic value if we observe it through a supra-rational lens. The quality of the execution, the top-notch materials we pick, the reliability and timelessness of our products - these are all efforts to make the object usable, preservable, passable from one person to another, and hopefully never discarded.

By this we hope our watches can win some wrist time from our collectors and, as you say, become personally significant through each person’s life path.

Your collaborations have ranged from specialist watch platforms to cultural institutions, each retaining the integrity of the core design. What has to be present in a partnership for it to feel like a meaningful extension of the UNIMATIC vocabulary rather than a superficial variation?

Giovanni Moro: Thank you. We select carefully who to work with, out of respect for the partners and ourselves.

We need to find resonance with the other brand or entity so the final output can be meaningful. Sometimes it’s a naturally shared DNA trait. Other times it’s a personal connection. Sometimes we simply want to see how far we can push the boundaries of the product we always make, and how another interpretation can enrich something already very familiar to UNIMATIC.

“Made in Italy” is a deliberate statement in a category so often defined by Swiss tradition. What does Italian production represent to you in terms of design autonomy, manufacturing control and cultural identity?

Giovanni Moro: While in other segments such as fashion, sports cars or luxury goods, “Made in Italy” is seen as a seal of quality, in watchmaking it becomes more of a statement - almost an exotic trait within a market ruled by Swiss and Japanese companies.

We like the fact of being independent and different also from a geographical point of view.

UNIMATIC occupies a rare position where accessibility coexists with a strong sense of collectability. How do you preserve that tension without allowing scarcity to overshadow the integrity of the object itself?

Giovanni Moro: It just happens. We don’t have any particular strategy or masterplan.

Many watches reveal their character gradually rather than immediately. What aspects of a UNIMATIC are intended to become apparent only after months of wear and daily use?

Giovanni Moro: It’s a very good question to which, to be honest, I don’t have an answer. We should ask our collectors.

I’m very biased and tunnel-vision oriented in the thorough details of our products and components.

Looking back at your earliest models, which elements of the original thesis remain inviolable, and where do you see the greatest opportunity to challenge your own assumptions over the coming decade?

Giovanni Moro: The general principles of the grammar are, to me, not negotiable. Since we have quite a good number of fixed constraints to take care of, most of our assumptions are there to stay.

What can change - and partially already has - is on the technical side of the products. Using Swiss movements such as the ETA 2893, for example, allowed us to reduce the thickness of the Modello Uno, Due and Quattro. That was a very desirable step, and the same reasoning applies whenever we are able to source even slimmer movements in the future.

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Words and questions by AW.

Answers courtesy of Giovanni Moro.

Photo courtesy of UNIMATIC.