Rolex, Blancpain, and the ascent of dive watches
After World War II, men’s daily fashion began to evolve toward the casual look we enjoy today. Denim jeans, leather jackets, and rugged boots all derive from either military garb or workwear that, before the 1960s, men rarely sported outside the workplace. Teenagers shook off Dad’s suit, looking to Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953) and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) for an edgier dress code. But what young men wore on their wrists remained dainty (by modern standards): dress watches with cases barely larger than a quarter, made of gold-capped steel and offering little to no water resistance.
Then, in 1964, the James Bond thriller Goldfinger featured Sean Connery sporting a Rolex Submariner Ref. 6538 under the cuff of a white tuxedo jacket, a striking combo that perfectly captured the character’s elegance and ruggedness in just a few frames of celluloid.
The Submariner had been introduced a decade earlier. Its oversize, 38mm waterproof “Oyster” case was a radical departure from contemporary wristwatches. Legendary scuba pioneer Jacques Cousteau and the British Ministry of Defence were early adopters, and though constantly revised and improved—the case has grown to 40mm and features a scratch-resistant ceramic bezel—the Submariner design remains relatively unchanged.
But while the Submariner may be the archetype of the dive watch, it wasn’t the genesis. The Blancpain Fifty Fathoms came first, in 1953, as a response to a military contract from the French navy’s elite combat swimmers. Blancpain took an existing watch and added the required rotating timing bezel, a water-resistant case with a screw-down crown, and an automatic-winding movement. After being dropped from the brand’s catalog in the 1990s, the Fifty Fathoms was reissued in 2007, and the line now spans more than 20 unique models.
Both the Fifty Fathoms and the Submariner were endlessly imitated, leaving meaningful deviation from these foundational designs until the late 1960s, when Doxa—a company that was better known for dress watches—issued the first ground-up dive-watch design aimed at professional divers. The Doxa SUB 300 included a funky (and very comfortable) cushion case, a versatile beads-of-rice bracelet, a clever bezel that included the U.S. Navy’s dive time scale, a category-leading depth rating, and unabashedly bright colors. Cousteau and the red-beanied crew of his Calypso research vessel were fans, and the Doxa SUB quickly became a totem of 1970s scuba culture.
By the 1980s, as the well-heeled began to flaunt their wealth, dive watches, especially Rolex models in gold, had become status symbols among preppies killing time at yacht and golf clubs. In the 1990s, massive dive watches with cases the diameter of jar lids were as prevalent in boardrooms as they were on the wrists of action heroes like Sylvester Stallone. Mercifully, modern tastes have shrunk dive watches to more vintage diameters.
That these tools of the 20th century became high-fashion items of the 21st is a curious pop culture phenomenon—dive watches having long outlived their original purpose as diving tools. All modern scuba divers rely on digital computers, leaving the mechanical dive watch to persist solely—and quite successfully—as a trusted staple in our wardrobes today.
A version of this article appears in the February 2020 issue of Fortune with the headline “The Ascent of Dive Watches.”
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