Going Deep On Watches. Extremely Deep

You may not need a watch capable of functioning 6,000 metres below sea level, but that's what makes the new class of extreme dive watches so damn cool, says GQ watch columnist Nick Foulkes.

- Nick Foulkes

OF ALL THE NEW releases at Watches and Wonders, the international watch trade show in Geneva that took place earlier this year, it was the hardest one to miss. The name alone was huge: TAG Heuer Aquaracer Professional 1000 Superdiver. A big name for a big 45-mm-diameter watch, it boasts a dodecagonal black-and-orange bezel, a chunky bracelet, a garage-door-size helium escape valve, and a brilliant arrowhead hour hand loaded with enough lume to read Proust in the dark-even at 1,000 metres underwater. With a large brutalist crown guard and a relatively slim-by deep-dive watch standards-15.75 mm thickness, the message is clear: TAG Heuer is back in the extreme dive watch market.

The Superdiver is a project close to TAG CEO Frédéric Arnault's heart, albeit one born out of frustration. A keen skier, golfer, chess master, and tennis player, Arnault is also an experienced diver. When I joined [TAG], I was approached to sponsor someone wanting to go deep diving, he says. I thought, Okay, that's cool and it's in line with our Don't Crack Under Pressure slogan. But if we do something like that, we need a watch that goes deep. And we didn't have that.