Feature: Tudor Black Bay 58 vs 54
A few years ago I described the Black Bay 58 by Tudor as the perfect watch. How do you improve on perfection? Well, Tudor’s tried with the new, smaller Black Bay 54, but is it actually better? Or was the 58 the peak? We’re going to find out if the 54 is perfecterer than perfect.
Background
To recap, why did I call the Tudor Black Bay 58 the perfect watch? Not because it was the best watch. It just does everything very, very well. No part of it stands out as being tops. It’s not the prettiest, or most complicated or cheapest or has the best heritage. It’s like Fernando Alonso in F1 right now, driving the Aston Martin. He just keeps popping up on the podium and those points all add up.
It’s consistent. Since 2012 when the Black Bay was first announced, it’s changed in terms that even glaciers find a little slow. You could imagine that 99% of the design credit for these watches goes to Xerox. And of course, being far cheaper than the Rolex Submariner on which it is based, it couldn’t be as nice as the expensive alternative. It’s like they took a vintage Submariner design and put it through Midjourney to add just a hint of caricature. You know what I mean. You look at it and it looks cool and everything, but there’s just something slightly cartoony about it.
But for a licensed replica at rock bottom prices, who’s going to complain? And then, with the Black Bay 58, when they ditched the date, shrank the bulky proportions down a bit and added a pop of vintage colouration, we all felt like our prayers had been answered. I mean, how often is it that a watchmaker actually makes the watch people want? Usually, they make something close but not quite. I’m sure there’s some sort of psychological consumer trolling going on there. Treat us mean, keep us keen.
The 58 was all things to all people. It was basically perfect. Sure, the crown sticks out a bit and the knurling feels a bit cheap, and sure, the bezel has a similar market-stall-watch texture, and yeah, it still has a hint of that bulbous Disneyfication compared to an actual vintage Submariner, but otherwise it gets podiums in every category across the board. Half the price of an Omega Seamaster, packing an in-house movement, looks like a vintage Rolex and is built to a very high quality. We, the people, were satisfied.
It's not a great business model though, is it, making the perfect watch. Once everyone who wants one has got one, there’s nothing left to do but shut up shop and go home. In broader business, there’s a thing called planned obsolescence, where manufacturers deliberately design their products to be a bit worse than they could be just to make sure customers keep coming back.
Take lightbulbs, for example. When they were incandescent, they only lasted so long before they went pop, and so the manufacturer sold you another. When LED technology came in, it quickly became apparent that those suckers could last a lifetime. We assumed the difference was because incandescent bulbs were tech-limited. Not the case. There’s an incandescent bulb in a fire station in Livermore, California that’s been glowing for over a hundred years. The bulb manufacturers collectively limited lifespan to 1,000 hours to keep them in business.
And so you might say that the shortcomings of the Black Bay 58, however small, were left to improve upon in the next edition. And here it is, the Black Bay 54. So, what’s going to stop this iteration being the one that puts Tudor out of business? Well, for a start, it’s very small, at a surprising 37mm. The 58 has won a few podiums here, the 54 a few podiums there. They’re neck and neck on points. Which one wins?
Review
To the casual passer-by, the 58 and 54 are essentially the same watch. One is based on a Tudor Submariner from 1958 and the other, you guessed it, 1954. That was the first Tudor Submariner and indeed the year of the first Rolex Submariner, too, so proper pedigree.
With only four years between their collective inspiration—that’s a year less than the gap between the 58 and 54 being released, by the way—the differences can be described by semantics. But that’s really what people like us are all about, so let’s get into it.
The 58’s design is more outgoing, in the same way Ernie is more outgoing than Bert. There’s a pop of extra colour on the bezel, gold for the numbers and a flash of red on the triangle at twelve. For some, it’s vintage gone mad, for others, it’s warm and feels like Christmas at Grandma’s. See what I mean about semantics? These things are weirdly important.
For the 54, the bezel borrows the original font and loses the minute markers in the first quarter. All the colours have been desaturated from it too. It feels much more functional. Like it’s turned up to its day job while the 58 is ready to fiesta. Chiefly, however, is the texture on the bezel edge. Yes, I know it’s like describing the differences between toothpastes, but as dull and boring as it is, it matters. Compared to the 58’s, which feels like the edge of a cheap file, the 54’s is more substantial. It’s not the full scallop of the Rolex’s, but it’s true to that 1954 Tudor Submariner.
You’ll find the same treatment on the crown. The 54’s is smaller, but more accurate and better finished. By comparison, the 58’s looks like a wheel from an old mechanical pencil sharpener. If they could make it right in 1954, there’s no excuses now.
The dials are broadly the same, albeit smaller and with less weight on the 54. The snowflake second hand is also replaced with a round lollipop style, as per the 1954 original. The snowflake hour hand remains, however, despite being wholly unoriginal on the 1954 model. You’ll also notice a rounded tip on the 54’s second hand counterweight and a taper on the hour hand towards the mounting point. It all adds up, people.
Both, much to the dismay of pedants everywhere, still have the rivetted bracelet, although there’s a get-out-of-jail-free card with the 54 in the shape of the rubber strap with the nicely integrated end links. For some reason the 54 gets the micro adjust T-fit and the 58 doesn’t, because reasons. Still, you can hop on over to Uncle Straps and get yourself something less riveting, so it’s not the end of the world.
As it stands, the 54 pips the 58 by a hair, and so in the last race there’s got to be a surprise intervention by the stewards to keep the competition nail-biting to the final lap. That’s right, in keeping with the 1954 original, Tudor nerfed the 54 down to 37mm, a size basically no one wears. If you’re one of the people who does wear that size and smaller, that’s because you’re part of the basically-no-one group.
Choosing the 37mm size really feels like the 54 was asked to go down in the 5th, to mix my sporting metaphors. I supposed I could’ve referenced Flavio Briatore and Crashgate but that might’ve been a bit too niche. By some stroke of luck, however, the 2mm shrinkage—the sea’s cold, I swear—doesn’t actually hurt as much as it seems. I have 7-inch wrists, and despite the 54 looking way too small on its own, putting it on and the hesitation seemed to disappear.
For some people, it will be too small. To me, it didn’t look silly. It looked fine. Enough to lunge into the last corner and scrape the win? By a nose, perhaps. If you were to ask Tudor what they’d recommend, they’d probably suggest both.
Which would you choose, the Black Bay 58 or the Black Bay 54?
