Don't Buy This Watch, Vol. I

The Tudor Black Bay 58 (for something called @thekris )

The premise for this exercise has been discussed. @Porthole and I are here to de-influence you into not buying a watch. No watches were harmed in this process.

Aurelian:  This selection is a tough one for me because I have no particular feelings either way about this watch. I am on record as liking a bit of gold now and then, and so the gilt works for me. My criticisms of Tudor almost always devolve to criticisms of Tudor buyers and enthusiasts more than the actual watch. That is a dangerous place to be.

I will never like snowflake hands. They are a gimmick. They are not refined or even really more legible (no one is taking one of these into murky water). I suspect the hands are mere branding, so that you can tell a Tudor at a glance and appreciate the excellent choice that the wearer has made. Well, hooray.

Every year when new models are released we get treated to a spate of articles that proclaim that “Tudor is stepping out of the shadow of big brother Rolex” or something like that. It is a cliché, and never true. Tudor was incepted to be the gateway to Rolex, much like Unicorn and Marconi before it. It is all marketing. To own a Tudor one must be comfortable knowing that your purchase is designed to get you what you really want, and wait for, and pay for, a Rolex. Tudor, as a brand will forever be the Roger Eno to the Brian. I know that people own and love Tudor in their own right, but they must still grapple with the fact that they have entered a cult. You are to love Rolex to the exclusion of every other brand. When you talk about your watch the story must be the struggle to get the watch of your dreams and all of the sacrifices that you made along the way. If someone said to me, in person, “I finally got the call” I would struggle to respond politely.

Back to the watch, it is a diver designed never to be wet. Owners think that it is elegant enough to wear to the opera, symphony, or black-tie event. It isn’t. It is a clunky diver with an abomination for an hour hand. The indices are straight Rolex. And, like Rolex, there is a haiku’s worth of unnecessary text on the dial.

Why should you not buy it? Why would you? Are you buying it to sit at the cool kid’s table? I struggle to see what about this watch compels such loyalty other than the tribal instinct to belong.

Porthole:  To me, this watch is style over substance. What is it for - it’s for posing, as a diver it just doesn’t cut it. The Tudor fan will forever be a mystery to me: either forever accepting the fact that they will never afford a Rolex, or forever convinced that Tudor is the new Rolex, and happy to be the bridesmaid and never the bride.

So - it’s a Submariner-lite, and it doesn’t get that right. The aluminium bezel is faux-vintage, the faux-tina is faux-vintage, the reference is faux-vintage. It’s not as shiny as a new Sub, but it’s not as cool as a gnarled vintage diver, it’s trying too hard to be one of the cool kids but we know it never goes out and is on a marching band scholarship to Penn State. It smoked weed but it never inhaled. 

The design is also a mess. A diver with no crown guards? Why does watch have a nipple? The text is just (expletive deleted) on there, no real thought, it’s too low, it’s too busy, why do I care if it’s official it’s still an awful watch. 

Square snowflake and seconds hand (British expletive deleted) with round indices, students of the Bauhaus would turn in their grave, it’s a convoluted mess. Tudor design is amazing - really? I’ve seen AliExpress divers pull off a more convincing Submariner homage than this. I’d recommend a San Martin or an Invicta over this if you wanted to get the style bang on.

People moan about a lack of date, please, that’s like moaning my Lamborghini didn’t come with a microwave.

What is this watch trying to be? A Pelagos? The Pelagos is a decent diver, go and buy one of them, it’s more akin to a Sub than this Sub-wannabe. I know the lume falls off those, so you can’t really dive in that either, but at least it looks like a proper diver.

Lots of colours, but “the only one to really get is the one in black” say the hardcore… lol… ok then. If you get the Bronze then we’ll all smell you coming, and the gold and higher end models are just too expensive for what this is.

The strap - the faux rivets are terrible, you might as well paint go faster stripes and claim it’s a Monaco. They’ve managed to (expletive deleted) a steel bracelet because the lines are off and it looks cheap. The micro-adjustment is not there either, you’ll be uncomfortable wearing this on the bracelet you paid extra for.

Oh, it’s unoriginal as well because these things are all over social media. Congratulations, you have no original thought. A career as an Instagram model awaits you, until you flip this watch like everyone else. The crushing realisation that this watch is just not amazing will rush you under $5000; I could have told you that for nothing. 

My main issue with the Black Bay series in general is that it sums up watch people perfectly. Tudor made the watch that everyone asked for at the time: it’s called the North Flag. Nobody bought it, because they also released this homage to their bigger sister’s leading dive watch, and everyone went mental for the homage and not the actual, decent, half-original watch they begged for. These are people who would drown at an oasis as they are too busy looking for a vending machine and they have no quarters. 

Then again, I am not surprised by this whole affair; Tudor also released the BB-01 and that was the ugliest watch I’ve tried on in a long time. How did Tudor make a dive watch that didn’t look like, or feel like a dive watch will always amaze me. Carry on…

Aurelian:  Style over substance, yes. Also, lifestyle projection. Like Rolex, it is a projection of success and style. I read somewhere that this is one of the most flipped watches. As I write this there are approximately 870 BB58’s for sale on Chrono24. Many of these sellers did not find the satisfaction that the watch promised. By contrast, there are only approximately one hundred Christopher Ward of all models for sale. A CW buyer is buying the watch, not the image, and is less likely to be disappointed by the purchase. (As an aside, there are only about sixty-five Cartier Roadster XL Chronographs for sale. This is because that watch is such an abomination that only approximately 100 were ever produced and many of these were destroyed by angry villagers with pitchforks.)  By maintaining the Rolex styling cues, the lettering and unnecessary text, the indices and the like, Tudor is bound on a leash to its parent company. It is the watch that Rolex was, or thought that it was, without a personality of its own. If you want fake vintage, you are better off with Bulova or Hamilton. They get the sizes wrong, but they have the style right (mostly, maybe). Here you are buying the dream of Bond wearing a sub with a tux. The BB58 is an Instagram watch.

Have you ever gone to a concert where the band was cooler than its fans? (Parrotheads, Phish fans, Boomer Deadheads “Listen to that solo, you can tell that Jerry is wearing the red shirt”.) It may be that brand adoration is also a profound negative. The pull of in-group affiliation is strong. But that’s no reason to buy a watch, this watch.

Porthole:  Only 870! You mean there are people actually wearing this watch in the wild?

Where are these people?

The other thing that is also bugging me with this watch is when I’ve seen certain watch reviewers or personalities talk about this watch it always feels like they are just mainly defending their choice. It is the exception to my rule “there is no such thing as the wrong choice”. The BB58 is the wrong choice, even for those who love it.

Stockholm Syndrome… the watch… thy name is the BB58.