Rolex Submariner

Why We Love It If you asked the average person on the street to picture a "wristwatch", there's a fair chance that most of them would probably conjure images of a Rolex Submariner. That is the transcendent nature of what it really means to be an icon.  There are essentially two camps of Submariner enthusiasts: date and no date. Purists maintain that its no-date or bust, with the raison 'd être being that if you need to know what date it is underwater, you're fucked. For this camp, the original Rolex Reference 5512 is as pure and enticing as they come.  This particular example is extremely clean, while showing normal signs of wear and use. In other words, it is an honest example that is priced accessibly and infinitely wearable. The meters first matte dial is clean, spotless and features warmly aged luminous material paired with a lightly faded bezel (one could be forgiven for calling it 'lightly ghosted.')   Whether this is your first dive into a sport Rolex or you've been wreck diving with them for decades, this four line no-date Sub is a wonderful choice for daily service. And every bit the icon. The Story The Submariner emerged at a time when oceanographer Jacques Cousteau exposed the world to the wonders of undersea exploration. Skin-diving as a sport became accessible to amateurs, and one by one watch brands—from Blancpain to Omega—brought out their own purpose-driven dive watches. Rolex was fortunate in that René Jeanneret, one of the company's directors, was a skin-diving enthusiast. This gave the Crown a unique insight into the development of their diving watch. They enlarged the Oyster case and made it thicker, offering added protection against pressure at depth, and capped the case with a rotating bezel. The dial they made black, a no-frills choice, and coated the hour plots and hands with a liberal amount of luminescent material. It was upon this template that all later references of Submariner would be modeled. Throughout the decades Rolex developed and improved the model, until by the mid-1960s the Submariner had become what it is today—a classic.