Daring To Ask The Difficult Question

About Tudor's latest offering...

Courtesy of Tudor

In truth, I have not been to a Spring watch show in Switzerland since 2019. And if I am completely honest, I am not sure that I miss it all that much. Late nights, lumpy beds, and tight schedules, and grumpy brand managers sneering down their noses at you. I always had a set of mixed emotions when it came to Tudor. Very often, back in the BaselWorld days they would group all of the North American & sundry other English speaking journalists together in one "mini theatre". It was generally a smooth running program, and inevitably there would be one or two really nice surprises. The type of new releases that would excite we cranky, underfed, often volunteer journalists. I fondly remember when the first Black Bay 36 (non-diver) was released. A particularly enthusiastic Rolex/Tudor fan from Hong Kong literally shoved me out of the way to get to the sample pieces. Now apart from poor manners, that's passion!

Me personally? I have long been a fan of what might be referred to as Tudor's less-loved children. You may remember me from such blog posts as "Advisor, you can ring my bell!"

Courtesy of Tudor

Or "Tudor, you can plant your (North) Flag on my wrist ANY TIME!"

And I say this as a true fan of these (in hindsight) slightly misfit toys. But something about this new iteration of the "GMT Master II-Electric-Boogaloo / Black Bay GMT" leaves me a bit cold.

Courtesy of Tudor

If I am very honest, this reminds me of that time at the turn of the century when Coca-Cola took a quite liberal stance on their "Everything's Better With Coke" slogan with the Coke "Freestyle" machine -

shamelessly borrowed from the world-wide infoweb

From one machine, a gazillion options. I Cherry Coke, Lemon Coke, Lime Coke, Peppermint Coke... okay, I made that last one up, but you get the idea ; )

Shamelessly borrowed from the world-wide infoweb

And it begs the question, just how many iterations can you truly squeeze from one dive watch? And do you really, truly want to try and find out? One glance at the relentless regurgitation that is the DOXA SUB collection should sufficiently answer that question.

As mentioned, I truly admire Tudor and have recently purchased one for myself. But needless to say, I am not feeling any buyers remorse based on this latest offering. I realize that I may well be one of the few dissenting voices on this latest offering, but I wonder if maybe Tudor could take a page from their own marketing materials and "be born to dare" to offer us something a little more adventurous, a little more daring. See what I did there?

But fear not! Watches and Wondering will be back the same time next year, so we'll see what Tudor might have in store for us.