Tudor draws on its diving watch history for the Pelagos FXD model, a new Tudor watch created in partnership with a specialist unit of the French Navy. Tudor, which launched the first modern professional divers’ watch in the 1950s, regularly supplied the French Navy with watches through to the 1980s, a history now revived.
‘Tudor provided diving watches to some of the largest navies in the world for decades,’ the brand tells us. ‘The relationship with the French Navy specifically, for its scale and duration, is an emblematic example of professional divers relying on Tudor watches to perform their duty. For Tudor to be able to reconnect with this heritage, to officially design a watch to unique specs with active duty combat swimmers and tell the “then and now” story, together with the French Navy, is very special. So special that we couldn’t possibly have told only a part of it.’
This new sporty piece is the result of a collaboration with the combat swimmers of the Commando Hubert unit, nodding to their complex requirements with a host of slick, functional features. In this new Tudor watch, fixed strap bars are machined into the main body of the watch itself, adding a toughness as well as reshaping the familiar silhouette of the case. ‘Cutting and finishing the strap channel was an entirely new process and took some iterations to perfect,’ the brand says.
Also new in the watch design is the rotating bezel that eschews the classic divers’ watch standard in favour of the underwater navigation codes utilised by combat swimmers. Divers are required to reach a location underwater, without surfacing, following a planned route while connected together in pairs. The divers must complete a series of swims, timed exactly, hence the need for a bezel that makes setting up and monitoring each crucial countdown effortless.
While historically, the French Navy had the watches delivered without straps – fitting them to their own straps or bracelets – this design comes with the single-piece fabric strap that has been supplied with the watches since 2010. For this new watch band in polyethylene woven ribbon, with its self-gripping fastening system, comfort is key.
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