Merely months from buzzing our towers once again, it’s still too soon to make a call on what Mr Tom Cruise’s Lieutenant Pete “Maverick” Mitchell will be rocking in Top Gun 2. Despite IWC SCHAFFHAUSEN’s official role as watchmaker to the US Navy’s real-life fighter-pilot school, aka “TOPGUN”, details remain strictly classified (for now).

What we can tell from fleeting glimpses throughout the trailer is that a matte-black bracelet watch is involved. Given the vast array of stealth-mode watches out there in solid ceramic, PVD nitride or DLC carbon coatings, that hardly narrows things down. But what you can pinpoint is the under-the-radar IWC that kickstarted it all, 25 years ago: 1994’s “Fliegerchronograph Keramik ref 3705”, now revived in a highly limited run of 1,000 “Tribute to 3705” timepieces, available exclusively on MR PORTER.

It’s a hugely desirable revival of a watch bearing the true hallmarks of a cult classic. For a start, sales of the original ref 3705 were bafflingly (now famously) slow, failing to reach four figures before being quietly retired in 1998 – undoubtedly down to how ahead of the curve Schaffhausen’s then-straight-laced watchmaker was, pairing black with black. The ref 3705, nevertheless, represents a tipping point for IWC, when it began recentring itself as a manufacturer of no-nonsense, precision tool watches, leaning on the DNA of its 1940s flying aces – the prewar Mark IX, the Luftwaffe’s B-Uhr, then 1948’s iconic RAF-issue Mark 11.

That jet-black ceramic was meant to be an alpha-male poster boy for IWC’s newfound materials expertise – collectors in the mid-1990s just didn’t know it yet. The next 25 years saw a slow-burning appreciation grow, fuelled by nerdy watch blogs, plus the “techno” style coined at the top end of the market by the likes of Richard Mille and Urwerk.

Such is the cool now ascribed to the ref 3705 that one example from the personal collection of the late, lamented IWC boss Mr Günter Blümlein was auctioned for a staggering $53,750 back in 2018 – almost 10 times over estimate.

Make no mistake, the black-on-black aesthetic wasn’t new in 1994, it’s just how IWC went about it. The story began in 1972 when now-defunct watchmaker Orfina pioneered the use of black physical vapour deposition (PVD) titanium nitride coatings, on behalf of Porsche Design (funnily enough, the exact watch Maverick wears in 1986’s Top Gun). IWC inherited the Porsche Design contract in 1978 and wasted no time pioneering titanium as a watch case material for 1980’s co-branded Porsche Design Titan.

Building on the success of titanium, IWC’s lab technicians ensured the brand was one of the first to master zirconium-oxide ceramics in the late 1980s – the very same material used for the ref 3705. Now, for this reissue, the new Tribute to 3705 stays faithful to the original’s Bat-look, but melds IWC’s history of materials innovation, evolving from ceramic to proprietary Ceratanium, which combines the lightness and toughness of titanium with the smooth aesthetic and scuff-resistance of ceramic. The sintering process causes a ceramic-like coating to bond directly to the surface of the titanium alloy, lending a distinctively sinister black sheen that’ll never scratch – let alone chip, unlike Orfina’s brittle PVD.

Things are kept just as fresh on the inside, with the in-house-manufactured 69380 chronograph calibre ticking away. It’s based on the geometry of Switzerland’s trusty 7750 workhorse, but with a column wheel coordinating the start/stop/rest stopwatch functions without the gritty “give” of a cam clutch – so you can wear it with as much faith and familiarity as the US Navy’s fast-jet pilots had in their F-14 Tomcats.