Description
Mido has released a Dia de los Muertos watch every year since 2020, and it has become one of the more reliably interesting annual editions in the sub-CHF-1,500 bracket — a genuine piece of cultural design rather than a colour swap. For 2026 the theme moves onto the Multifort TV for the first time, the square-cased member of the family, and brings with it a subject Mido has not used before: alebrijes.
Alebrijes are the fantastical composite creatures first dreamed up by the Mexican artist Pedro Linares in the 1930s, assembled from parts of real and imagined animals and painted in deliberately impossible colours. Here they surround a central calavera — the decorated skull of the Day of the Dead — on a grey-to-black gradient dial, engraved in negative relief and finished with twelve lacquers and three different colours of Super-LumiNova.
Reference M049.526.11.081.02 arrives with three interchangeable straps and a Calibre 80 movement, at CHF 1,250 / EUR 1,450 / USD 1,525 / GBP 1,125.
Design
The Multifort TV case is unchanged: 40mm by 39.2mm in 316L stainless steel, 46.85mm lug-to-lug, 11.5mm thick, with satin-finished and polished surfaces alternating across a three-part construction and a sandblasted dot marking 12 o'clock. A double-sided anti-reflective sapphire crystal sits over the dial, a transparent caseback shows the movement, crown guards protect the screw-down crown, and water resistance is 100m.
The dial is where the money went. Against a grey-to-black gradient, the calavera carries the word "Multifort" printed across it, with alebrijes engraved in negative relief around it and several of them hand-painted using twelve lacquers and three Super-LumiNova tones. The Big Date sits at 12 o'clock and hides the best detail in the watch: the numeral 1 is shaped like a bone. Hour markers at 3 and 9 o'clock are applied, the rest are round and recessed, and all are lumed, as are the diamond-cut faceted hour and minute hands. The flat central seconds hand and the printed minute track on the inclined inner flange are left unlumed — which is deliberate, because in the dark the dial itself is the show, the skull and the creatures emerging in fewer colours but no less character.
Specifications
- Reference: M049.526.11.081.02
- Case dimensions: 40mm × 39.2mm
- Case thickness: 11.5mm
- Lug-to-lug: 46.85mm
- Case material: 316L stainless steel, satin-finished and polished
- Crystal: sapphire with double-sided anti-reflective coating
- Caseback: transparent display caseback
- Crown: screw-down, with crown guards
- Water resistance: 100m
- Dial: grey-to-black gradient with calavera and alebrijes motifs in negative relief, twelve lacquers and three colours of Super-LumiNova
- Movement: Mido Calibre 80, based on the ETA C07.651
- Complications: Big Date at 12 o'clock
- Balance spring: Nivachron
- Jewels: 25
- Frequency: 21,600 vph (3 Hz)
- Winding: automatic
- Adjustment: three positions
- Power reserve: up to 80 hours
- Straps: stainless steel integrated-style bracelet with folding clasp, stainless steel Milanese mesh with sliding clasp, and red textured rubber strap with pin buckle — all included, on quick-change bars
- Edition: special edition (not numbered)
- Price: CHF 1,250 / EUR 1,450 / USD 1,525 / GBP 1,125
- Availability: available now
What's Exciting
The value arithmetic is blunt and in Mido's favour. Eighty hours of power reserve from a Nivachron-equipped automatic adjusted in three positions, a big date module, 100m of water resistance, a sapphire display back, and then three straps in the box — a steel bracelet, a Milanese mesh and a red rubber — for around CHF 1,250. Buying a second bracelet alone from most brands costs a meaningful fraction of that. The Calibre 80's 21,600 vph beat rate is the trade (a slower balance is how you get to 80 hours on this architecture), and it is the right trade at this price.
What lifts it above a good-value proposition is that the dial is actually designed rather than decorated. Negative-relief engraving under twelve lacquers is real work, the three-tone lume means the watch has a genuinely different personality after dark rather than just a glowing outline, and the bone-shaped 1 in the Big Date is the kind of detail that costs nothing to specify and everything to think of. Mido could have printed a skull on a dial and called it a Day of the Dead edition; six years into the series, it is still making the harder version.
History
Mido was founded in Zurich in 1918 by Georges Schaeren and has spent most of its modern life inside the Swatch Group as the value-engineering specialist — the brand that delivers Swiss automatic watchmaking with long power reserves at prices well under the group's luxury tiers. The Multifort name dates to 1934, when it launched as one of the first watches to combine automatic winding with anti-magnetic, water-resistant and shock-protected construction, and it remains the brand's core collection.
The Multifort TV is the square-cased interpretation, named for the television-screen silhouette of its case, and it has become the collection's design-led outlet. The Dia de los Muertos editions began in 2020 and have run annually since, previously on other Mido cases; 2026 is the first time the theme has been applied to the TV, and the first time alebrijes rather than the calavera alone have carried it.
