The dive watch is undoubtedly popular and is almost certainly the most popular type of watch. Happily, you don’t actually have to be a diver to wear one. This is especially good for someone like me who gets seasick at the mere sight of a small boat. There are many types of diving such as snorkelling, scuba, free diving and many more. The most popular form of diving is without doubt desk diving which doesn’t involve water at all. The C60 Trident is still the most popular range at Christopher Ward but isn’t the only dive watch in the range. The C65 Aquitaine range was launched in 2022 and has been a hidden gem. Christopher Ward have partnered with seconde/seconde to create a new limited edition which celebrates the Aquitaine and the most common form of diving; the C65 Desk Diver Limited Edition
Design
Retro, dive watch, humorous, quirky
The C65 Aquitaine is a homage to the 1953 Blancpain Fifty Fathoms and has suffered a little bit because of that. Yet it has a Light-catcher™ case, a sapphire bezel, a relatively demure size of 41mm with a lug to lug of only 46.68 and a 200m water resistance. This is clearly perfect as a desk diver. Romaric André, a.k.a. Seconde/Seconde clearly agrees. He says “Watches have the unique ability to transport the wearer from the banal to the exceptional. When you put on a dress watch, boom, surrounded by Art Deco furniture and Carrare Marble, when wearing an Explorer you feel like you are scaling Mt. Everest.
“Reversing this trajectory and taking you back into hard-core-norm-core felt like the obvious next step. At work, you never know what is going to happen next, arguably making it the most unconquered landscape of all. I wanted to remind people to try and find something amazing in the everyday, instead of fantasising about where they could be.
Given free rein to create a watch with the brand he has let his creativity flow. The dial is relatively normal. There is a small “s” next to the twin flag logo and a yellow post-it note with the words “Desk Diver” at 6 o’clock. The fun begins at the minute track and bezel. The modern desk bound day is extremely stressful and the dial provides timely reminders to take a break, to engage in some collaboration with colleagues or, let’s face it, engage in some office gossip and politics. To stay healthy there are reminders to move, take a break or even engage in some furtive doomscrolling. I love the way that that these activities are given time slots and recommended units. The corporate mental health guidelines have clearly been thrown out of the window.
The 120 click unidirectional bezel goes further. It has markings for human interaction and how that can affect your faith in humanity or if you are an extrovert how this effects your dopamine levels. The most interesting interaction would be with the back-stabbing knife on the bezel combined with office politics on the dial. How many of my meetings has Romaric sat in? All of this is done with a whimsical sense of humour that is part Dilbert and part reality check. Coffee goes with break, meetings are in three phases; say high, power nap and say bye. It just lacks a reminder to be on mute with the camera off for the power nap stage.
There is one final touch. On the 31st of the month the numbers are replaced with coins to remind you that you will get paid for your suffering.
Watch Specifications
316L Steel, 41mm diameter, 12.45mm high, lug tip to lug tip = 46.68mm and a lug width of 22mm, water resistance of 200m
The back of the watch hasn’t escaped from the barrage. A lot of dive watches try to add a dive associated motif on the case back. The C65 Diver is no exception. The “obligatory” air tank has been replaced by a paperclip to help you keep all those important mid-meeting doodles neatly organised.
No normal review talks about packaging. It’s just the stuff the watch comes in. Not this time. The packaging is part of the theme. The box is a custom design and contains Christopher Ward branded, yellow Post-it® notes, a pencil (yellow), board pins (yellow0 and even a highlighter in yellow. If this wasn’t enough yellow, they even include a DeLugs strap in yellow so that you can wile away the hours spent in meetings doing something useful like changing the look of your watch. How very productive.
Movement
Selitta SW200-1, 28,800 vph, 38 hour power reserve
Price & Availability
Bader Bracelet (3 link) £1,395/$1,395, Black rubber tropic strap £995/$1,195
Limited Edition of 500 pieces, Available from September 26th 2024
Concluding Thoughts
I’ve lost track of how many Brand X x seconde/seconde collaborations there have been. According to the seconde/seconde website this would be the eight in 2024 alone. They are almost a meme in and of themselves. It was inevitable that Christopher Ward would eventually have a collaboration with him too. This collaboration takes the ideas of Romaric André a lot further than most. Such free rein must have been a delight for the artist and the result is a somewhat cynical and slyly humorous delight too.
The daily drudgery of zoom meetings, town halls and 1:1s will be familiar to too many. We may want to be doing something else but the bills have to be paid. What’s wrong with a little bit of fun. The C65 desk diver is that little bit of fun and it won’t even get you a meeting with HR and a new office policy. The collaboration between Adrian Buchmann and Romaric André has made the more is more philosophy a winner in this case. Slyly, ironically humorous it certainly is. It’s a watch both parties should be proud of even if you might have to hide it from your colleagues lest your hidden thoughts are revealed on your wrist. Just remember too never let anyone near the packaging as all those useful paper clips and so on will never be seen again.
Limited edition of 500 available to order from the Christopher Ward website on the 26th of September.
