Black Bay 58 Black

This is the original black Black Bay Fifty-Eight, the 39 mm steel diving watch Tudor introduced in 2018. It has three hands, a black face and a rotating ring for timing elapsed minutes. Gold-coloured hands and markings, cream-coloured luminous material and a red triangle above twelve give it the look of an earlier generation. The colours were chosen that way; they are not evidence that the watch has aged.

The older watch behind the name was Tudor's 1958 Submariner reference 7924. It had a large winding crown without the protective shoulders that later diving watches acquired. The Fifty-Eight keeps that exposed crown and a raised, curved crystal. But its crystal is sapphire, and the broad square on the hour hand comes from Tudor designs introduced in 1969. The familiar “snowflake” nickname describes that hand. It also makes the shorter hour hand easy to distinguish from the long minute hand used to read the timing ring.

There is no calendar window. The automatic MT5402 movement was developed for this smaller watch and stores about 70 hours of running time when fully wound. At 11.9 mm thick, the case is relatively restrained for a modern automatic diver. Its shape and its movement were developed together, rather than putting a smaller face on the existing larger Black Bay.

The black aluminium timing insert is less glossy than the ceramic rings used by many modern divers. Around it, the gold-coloured numerals repeat the colour of the hands; the small red triangle breaks that pattern just once. That triangle is enough to tell the bezel's starting position at a glance.

Tudor offered the watch on a steel bracelet, leather or woven fabric. On the bracelet, visible rivet heads suggest an old folded-link construction, although the links themselves are solid. It is another old detail retained without retaining the old way of making it.