luxury watch, panerai Courtesy of Panerai
When it comes to picking a watch, there’s always some thing alluring about a timepiece built for extreme situations. A bit of kit that can handle the rigours of going to the moon, scaling Everest, or plunging into icy ocean depths.
Perhaps they remind us of the people we admire or, more likely, those we would like to be. But even if we can’t (or don’t really want to) live life so fully on the edge, there’s no reason that we can’t own a watch built for the occasion. The Panerai Submersible QuarantaQuattro collection are three such watches.
Panerai has history when it comes to this sort of thing, of course. The watch brand of choice for the Italian Navy for the best part of four decades, it supplied their specialist diving corps with precision instruments – also supplying watches to the Egyptian Navy in 1956.
Quite fantastically, the designs developed by Panerai during its military service – the Luminor and Radiomir – were classified under the Military Secrets Acts for many years afterwards, only seeing daylight after the company was eventually acquired by the Richemont Group in 1997.
The three new models – starring individual pairings of colour and material – make mean additions to the Submersible line-up, fitting (literally) with a new size case that, at 44mm offers a middle ground between the current 42 and 47mm options.
There’s also a uni-directional rotating bezel to measure submersion time and a P.900 caliber that features a seconds sub-dial at 9 o’clock and supplies a three-day power reserve. Something that will migrate to the Submersible collection as a whole, meanwhile, is the improved date window providing increased legibility.
Where you go from here is down to you. Whether the handsome ‘Blu Abisso’ in Carbotech™ or the striking ‘Bianco’ or black in brushed steel, this trio is built to take you stylishly into the depths – and make a statement while you’re down there.
Continuing Panerai’s commitment to environmentally conscious practices, the first rubber strap is made from 30 per cent of recycled materials while, like all straps from the Submersible QuarantaQuattro collection, the second is composed of 68 per cent recycled fabric material.
Ultimately, the watch you choose can say a lot about you. The person you are and the person you’d like to be. When it comes to Panerai’s Submersible QuarantaQuattro collection, we can’t help but think it makes you look as smart above sea level as it does below it.
[Via GQ Middle East]
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