TIMEX and BEAMS Give the Camper a Fourth Corner With a New Silver Special Order

BEAMS is putting a square face on one of its longest running watch collide, with a silver edition of the Camper landing in Japan in early August 2026.

TIMEX and BEAMS have spent close to a decade turning one watch, the Camper, into a running conversation about what a cheap military field piece can become in the hands of a Japanese select shop. The newest chapter is a Square Camper rendered in silver, set for release in Japan in early August 2026, and it arrives at a moment when the two companies have already tried nearly every other material on the same base design.

The Timex × BEAMS collaboration pairs a polished square analog-digital watch with archival-inspired styling in a campaign celebrating the partners’ latest reinterpretation of the Camper.

Anyone who has followed the line knows the drill by now. TIMEX supplies the bones: a legible dial, a lumed hand set, a movement built to survive being forgotten in a jacket pocket for a year. BEAMS supplies the framing device, the material story that turns a nine dollar field watch into something a Harajuku shop window can justify charging real money for. Stainless steel came first, then a fifty piece run in sterling silver, then copper, then a run finished in gold. A square case marks new territory, since the Camper family has stayed round since its original 1980s military run.

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The original Camper was never meant to be collected. It was designed for the U.S. military as a disposable, mass producible field watch, cheap enough that a soldier could lose one without much consequence. TIMEX brought the design back from discontinuation in 2015 as a Japan market project, working without the original blueprints and rebuilding the look by hand and by eye until it matched period examples closely enough to satisfy Japan’s famously exacting vintage watch collectors.

That backstory is a big part of why BEAMS keeps returning to it. Japan has a deep bench of Timex specialists and secondhand dealers who treat the Camper less like a disposable tool watch and more like a design object worth studying, and BEAMS has built an entire sub genre of seasonal drops around feeding that appetite. Every version keeps the same face and the same general proportions. What changes is the material, the finish, and occasionally the shape of the lugs, which gives BEAMS a low risk way to keep a decades old design feeling current without touching what actually makes the Camper legible and durable.

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Silver already has a track record inside this collision, and it is worth separating from the new square release. Back in 2021, BEAMS and TIMEX put out a fifty piece run built from sterling silver, marketed under the STERLING SILVER designation with a silver purity of 92.5 percent for both the case and the bracelet. That version paired a hand wound movement with BEAMS’ own separate lug construction, a detail that let the bracelet come off without tools, and it carried a price well beyond the brand’s usual affordable territory precisely because of the precious metal content.

A separate stainless steel Camper, also finished in a plain silver tone, has been a more accessible mainstay of the collaboration since 2021, retailing closer to twenty four thousand yen and built around the same tool free bracelet system. Between the two, BEAMS has effectively already tested silver as both a premium material story and an everyday finish, which makes a square cased silver model less of a leap and more of a natural next entry in a lineage that already understands what silver does for this design.

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What makes the new release notable inside the Camper family is the shape itself. Every prior version, whether finished in copper, gold, sterling silver, or plain stainless steel, has kept the same rounded military case that defined the original 1980s piece. A square Camper breaks that pattern for the first time in the connection’s public run, and it puts BEAMS in conversation with a different corner of watch history entirely, the mid century square cased field and dress watches that predate the Camper’s own rounded military design.

Square cases read differently on the wrist than round ones. They tend to sit flatter, expose more dial real estate along the edges, and lean dressier even at the same case diameter, which could explain why BEAMS chose silver rather than a warmer tone like copper or gold for the debut. A cooler, brighter finish tends to suit a squared off case better than it does a rounded military shape, and it keeps the piece closer to the clean, understated tone BEAMS has favored across its stainless and 925 silver Campers rather than the more overtly retro character of the copper and skeleton editions.

 

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The recurring signature across every BEAMS era Camper has been the separate lug construction, which lets the bracelet detach without a spring bar tool, something the standard Timex Camper does not offer out of the box. Lumed hands and hour markers have also carried through every version, a nod to the original’s military purpose even as the watch has drifted further from anything resembling a field tool. Expect the square silver edition to hold onto both features, since they have become closer to house signatures than one off design choices at this point.

Packaging has also become part of the story with recent drops. The gold Camper released in a tin can matched to the watch’s colorway, marketed explicitly as reusable storage rather than disposable box material, a small gesture toward sustainability that BEAMS has leaned into more heavily in its accessory collaborations generally. Whether the square silver edition repeats that packaging idea has not been confirmed, but it fits the pattern the collaboration has settled into over its last several releases.

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TIMEX has had an unusually active 2026 by its own standards, with a run of releases spanning titanium tool watches, colorful dive models, and nostalgic reissues that have pushed the brand further into enthusiast territory than its everyday reputation usually suggests. Earlier this year, BEAMS BOY marked the retailer’s 50th anniversary with an Original Camper Ring Watch, shrinking the field watch down into a wearable ring built around a Japanese quartz movement, a project buyers had reportedly been requesting for over a decade before BEAMS finally solved the engineering problem of fitting a functional movement into something that small.

That ring watch and the incoming square silver Camper both point to the same underlying strategy. Rather than let the Camper collaboration go stale, TIMEX and BEAMS keep testing how far the base design can stretch, first through material, then through scale, and now through shape. A square case sits alongside a ring sized movement as evidence that neither company sees the Camper as a finished design so much as a template they can keep reworking as long as the silhouette stays recognizable.

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The Square Camper Silver is slated for release in Japan in early August 2026, following the pattern BEAMS has used for past Camper drops, typically an online pre order window through BEAMS’ official site ahead of in store availability across its Japanese locations. Past silver editions in this collaboration have landed at very different price points depending on material purity, from the roughly twenty four thousand yen stainless steel Camper to the six figure yen sterling silver limited run, so where the new square edition lands on that spectrum will say a lot about whether BEAMS is positioning it as an day piece or another small batch collector’s item.

Case specifics for the new model have not been independently confirmed at the time of writing. Prior Camper collisions have generally held to a 36mm case, a mineral or acrylic crystal depending on the finish, and 3 ATM water resistance, and it would be consistent with the line’s history for the square edition to land somewhere close to those numbers, though BEAMS has adjusted proportions before when moving to new shapes or materials. Anyone considering the piece should confirm final specifications, pricing, and the exact pre order date through BEAMS’ official channels once the listing goes live, since exact figures for this specific release were not available through public reporting as of this writing.