Navy-Inspired Dive Watches
While military personnel are no longer issued wristwatches as essential gear, a number of brands continue to celebrate their historic legacies in supplying armed forces with high-precision timekeepers.
Panerai’s esteemed military history includes the robust, luminous dive watches it supplied for the Italian Royal Navy in 1935 for a secret program of underwater assault vehicles. Last year, the brand partnered with the U.S. Navy SEALs in a set of five watches that bear the elite unit’s label. In military green, the Submersible Chrono Navy SEALs Experience Edition–PAM1402 ($61,700, limited to 50 pieces, center) is a 47-mm flyback chronograph in the brand’s brushed Brunito Steel with a ceramic anticlockwise rotating bezel and water resistance down to 30 bar (about 300 meters). The “Experience” in the name references a grueling Special Operations Experience that comes with purchase.
The new Tudor Pelagos FXD ($4,150, right) takes its cues from watches that the brand made for the U.S. Navy from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. The 42-mm, satin-brushed titanium diver with fixed strap bars has a matte-black dial that is appointed with the brand’s signature square hour markers and angular “Snowflake” hands, which heighten the intensity of the luminescence. Waterproof down to 200 meters, the watch is equipped with a luminous unidirectional rotating bezel that tracks dive times.
When Blancpain launched the Fifty Fathoms in 1953, it set dive-watch standards that stand to this day and earned the firm commissions from France, Germany, Norway and the United States to supply watches for their combat divers. The latest of a trio of special editions that marks this year’s milestone is the Fifty Fathoms 70th Anniversary Act 3 ($32,000, 555 pieces, left). It pays tribute to a 1957 MIL-SPEC (military specification) with its moisture indicator.
The new MIL-SPEC stays true to its ancestor with a matte-black dial that lights up with vintage Super-LumiNova on the moisture indicator, as well as hour-markers and diving scale on the unidirectional black ceramic rotating bezel. The two-tone NATO strap is made from recovered fishing nets. Faithful to the original’s 41.3-mm diameter, the case is made of 9K Bronze Gold, a patented alloy that adds gold to prevent oxidation, which would turn the skin and case metal green with time. Anchors aweigh!
