In the past 10 years, Tudor has been doing a killer job with its contemporary offerings — especially in the tool watch department.
Timepieces from their Black Bay, Heritage Chronograph, and Ranger collections have been flying off the shelves for their impressive looks, sporty construction and aggressive price points. But for sheer utility, sportiness, and integration of modern materials, it’s the Pelagos line that has us most impressed.
Though it draws from Tudor’s back catalog of dive watches for aesthetic inspiration, the Pelagos brings a forward-thinking design to the professional-grade watch arena. Constructed from titanium and featuring a unique automatically-adjusting clasp system for their bracelet models, this is the type of timepiece that a saturation diver could happily strap on while working hundreds of meters below the surface. And more recently, we’ve seen the Pelagos collection make a 10/10 splash with the introduction of the Pelagos 39, whose reduced proportions make the dive watch even more appealing to a casual wearer.
This particular Pelagos, a Reference M25600TB-0001, represents one of the first building blocks for the collection and features a 42mm titanium case with a helium escape valve, sapphire crystal, signed crown, and a unidirectional rotating dive timing bezel with a luminous black insert and 60 clicks. It features a bright blue dial with luminous indices, an outer minute track, date window at 3:00, and a ‘snowflake’ handset.
Paired to an excellent multi-link titanium bracelet with the brand's proprietary self-adjusting clasp, this piece is powered by the in-house, COSC-certified Tudor Calibre MT5612 automatic movement with a 70-hour power reserve.
We can’t state this clearly enough: The Pelagos is one of the best dive watch designs of the 21st century — and very well may be the most sensible choice from the Rolex family for professional divers.
It is nothing short of a modern classic.