Conquest

The Conquest debuted in 1954 with reference 9001, at a time when the post-war economic boom was turning the wristwatch into an everyday companion for the active lifestyle of the new middle class. The name Conquest carries an importance for Longines that goes beyond a single model: it is in fact the first collection name of the manufacture to be officially registered and protected with the Federal Intellectual Property Office in Bern, a step that marked for the company the beginning of a commercial strategy based on product families with their own recognizable identity, rather than relying solely on reference numbers.

Conceptually, the original Conquest anticipates what would today be called a "GADA" philosophy (Go Anywhere, Do Anything): with its 35 mm steel case, the automatic Longines caliber 19AS movement and a screw-down case back designed to ensure good water resistance, it is not a specialist watch for a single activity, but a versatile companion, rugged enough for sporting use and at the same time sober enough to go with formal attire — a combination of sportiness and classicism that Longines has claimed as the line's distinctive trait since launch.

In the following years the Conquest continued to evolve: reference 9028 from 1959 introduced a central power-reserve indicator, a technical detail rare for the time that Longines revived in a celebratory form in 2024, on the occasion of the line's seventieth anniversary. The most significant leap, however, came in 1984 with the Conquest V.H.P. (Very High Precision): exploiting quartz technology, which in those years many high-end Swiss brands still regarded with suspicion after the crisis of the 1970s, Longines demonstrated that quartz precision could coexist with the elegance and build quality of a luxury watch, reaching in its most recent versions advanced functions such as instant hand repositioning and a perpetual calendar. Today the Conquest name identifies an entire family of models — from the more elegance-oriented Conquest Classic to the HydroConquest, its sportier diving variant, and the Conquest Heritage, which reinterprets the 1954 shapes in a contemporary key — confirming how the versatile concept imagined seventy years ago remains relevant today.