Valentine’s Day is a marketing opportunity for many watch brands and the perfect occasion to launch special editions. Blancpain has been producing Valentine’s Day models for more than two decades, with watches decked out in diamonds and red accents, like these Villeret or Ladybird models. This year, Blancpain turns to another collection to celebrate the […]
Two dive watches have long battled for the title of the original diver’s watch: the Rolex Submariner and the Blancpain Fifty Fathoms. Technicalities can drag this debate into murky deep waters, but irrefutably the pair are the founding blueprints of what we all expect from a dive watch. Born in 1953, the Fifty Fathoms has … Continued
The post What is so special about the new Blancpain Fifty Fathoms 70th Anniversary Act 1? appeared first on Time and Tide Watches.
The post What is so special about the new Blancpain Fifty Fathoms 70th Anniversary Act 1? appeared first on Time and Tide Watches.
Welcome to a new year. Welcome to 2023. If there’s one thing that watch brands love, it’s celebrating their heritage. Vintage has been one of the main inspirations for the past 10 to 15 years, and we’ve seen plenty of commemorative models released in 2022 – think about the 50-year Royal Oak. Why should 2023 […]
Renowned as the blueprint for modern dive watches, Blancpain’s archetypal Fifty Fathoms of 1953 is coming up for its grand 70th birthday. As an essential player in the development of scuba diving and the watch chosen by elite diving corps worldwide, the heyday of the Fifty Fathoms spanned from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s. […]
In 2012, the Year of the Dragon, Blancpain presented a Traditional Chinese Calendar watch. It featured not just the Chinese but also a Gregorian calendar date indication. There is a practical reason for including both calendars; the Gregorian calendar is used for universal (civil) purposes, and the lunisolar determines when it’s (Chinese) party time. Since […]
The end of the year is near, so it’s time for the MONOCHROME team to sit down and look back at everything that happened in 2022… And there was a lot, with so many new watches launched, in all categories and in all price ranges. Today, we kick off a series of buying guides representing […]
Downsizing is a word that comes with two faces. On one end you might feel corners are cut, you get less bang for your buck, and the experience is less fun. A good example is cars, where downsizing usually means less power, less performance and often less joy to drive. On the other end, specifically […]
It’s impossible to talk about the modern scuba diving watch and its evolution without talking about Blancpain. As one of the earliest creators of the purpose-built tool watch, they are responsible for multiple innovations in the field, including using an o-ring to seal the case back, and a pioneering crown seal system. Their name belongs […]
Blancpain‘s famous Fifty Fathoms dive watch surfaced in 1953 and became the benchmark for many modern dive watches. After being reinforced with magnetic shielding, the robust diver was adopted by French Navy combat swimmers. The 1956 Bathyscaphe, named after the submarine that fathomed the Marina Trench, was a smaller-sized dive watch with calendar indications designed […]
If you know your dive watch history, the name Fifty Fathoms No Rad (for no radiations) should be familiar. In fact, it should even ring the bell twice. One, when Blancpain was a supplier to the navies of numerous armed forces worldwide, with a military Fifty Fathoms delivered to the Bundeswehr, the iconic and rare “BUND […]