Review: Longines Legend Diver Bronze

What are the ingredients for a cool watch? History, style, material, colour, brand—it’s a lot to fulfil and the expectation of a pretty entry-level Swiss watch to fulfil it is fairly low. Can this Legend Diver from Longines achieve it?

History

Longines has been making dive watches since 1958. That’s not particularly impressive when it comes to the oldest watch manufacturers in the world, with the first arriving earlier in that decade from Blancpain and Rolex. Others were quick to follow in the age-old tradition of the band wagon jump, and by 1958, some five years after the first, it was more a case of being left out if you didn’t have a dive watch in your line-up than the other way around.

Makes Longines seem rather unremarkable in that respect—but then again, what we’re saying here is that this is one of the watchmakers that was there at the cutting edge of the entry of this technology into mainstream industry. Well, maybe not cutting edge, perhaps ever so slightly dulled edge by 1958.

The point is, Longines did it when it mattered. Before a dive watch was a wrist ornament. When businesses were competing to have their watches be the first to discover the unknown oceans. Porsche was founded five years after Mercedes, but you’d hardly call them unremarkable. Longines wasn’t the first, but it was there. Buzz Aldrin still walked on the moon, and there are a whole bunch of people who haven’t.

Style

The first dive watch Longines made in 1958 wasn’t the same as this one. It was fairly simple, fairly straight-forward—fairly Rolex Submariner-ish. But Longines had other ideas, acutely aware of the fact that it was about to disappear in amongst all the other watchmakers trying to do the same thing if it wasn’t careful.

So, in 1959, Longines moved things around a bit, taking the outer bezel and plopping it on the inside and adding another crown to control it. Sounds like a lot of extra hassle over a standard unidirectional bezel, and it is. They say it further reduces the chances of adjusting the bezel by accident and killing yourself. Strictly speaking, yeah. In the same way a wider spoon would stop you swallowing it when you eat your cereal.

Nevertheless—it looks so damn cool. In a sea of watches that look like a Submariner, the twin crown, internal bezel scenario is just different, and different is cool. Here it’s 42mm across and 12.7mm thick, and the lugs are longer than a Tolkien novel, but if it wears right on your wrist then it really works.

Material

When the Legend Diver was first revealed in 1959 it came in steel. Fine. That’s how dive watches were made for very practical reasons. These days, however, you don’t have to worry too much about ultimate performance when you’re splashing around in the shower, and so whilst this modern Legend Diver still packs a hefty 300m of water resistance, some concessions can be made with the construction.

Usually what that means is reducing the quality and saving costs, but here we’ve lost steel for a very different reason: coolness. Before steel, seafarers and landfarers alike pillaged the hills for a material so legendary it defined an entire era. Before iron and after stone, we had bronze.

Freshly finished and out of the box, bronze could easily be mistaken for gold, but leave it a while and over time it’ll start to, well, rust. Except, unlike the self-destructive process steel goes through when it rusts, bronze is a bit different. The oxidisation forms only on the surface, creating a hardened, protective shell that can more or less self-heal. Added to that, it also looks really cool. And don’t worry—it won’t stain your wrist green like cheap market jewellery because Longines have kindly included a hypoallergenic titanium case back.

Colour

When it comes to cool, there’s nothing cooler than colour. The words are almost identical. And when it comes to colour, right now at least, green is where it’s at. That’s why they made the dial of this bronze Legend Diver a nice, deep, bottle green. It’s a good choice; for the colour science nerds, green is almost exactly opposite on the colour wheel to the reddy-goldy case for real popping contrast—and when the case eventually turns green itself, they’ll match perfectly.

Longines didn’t just colour swatch a handy lime and call it a day. We get a smoky fade into black that was almost certainly chosen to avoid creating new bezels—but who cares, because it looks especially, properly cool. In expensive watches they’re known as fumé dials, and they cost a lot of money. This isn’t that, but it still looks like it, and that’s cool enough.

The bezel gets a luminous triangle so it’s proper, and behind the dial, turning the red gold-but-not-actually-red gold hands is a the calibre L888, based on the ETA A31. It has an unusually cool 3.5Hz beat and a handily contemporary 72-hour power reserve. And… and… it has no date! Or at least no date window. The original didn’t have a date, the original re-release—if that makes sense—didn’t have a date and this doesn’t either. Clean, clear—and very cool.

Brand

Put all that together and what do you get? A stylishly different diver that looks really smart, performs well and wears great—so long as you’re packing a bit of wrist girthage. But this watch could be the second coming and it wouldn’t be worth a jot if the brand name on the dial wasn’t just as cool. Just so happens then that Longines is one of the best watchmakers to ever exist, ever.

It may seem these days that a Longines’ natural habitat is the furthest cabinet at the back of the airport duty free, but that is basically sacrilege. Longines was and should be as big or bigger than Omega. Turns out, when daddy Swatch was deciding how to pitch those two brands ahead of their revival, they decided Omega was easier to pronounce and slotted Longines a few rungs lower. Or at least, so I’ve heard…

In a fair fight, however, Longines could take on Omega no problem. Longines has been official timekeeper for the Olympics. It has the oldest registered logo. It established big accuracy and volume improvements in production. It won multiple quality and accuracy prizes, including the grand prize at the Universal Exhibition. It supplied professional explorers with watches for record-breaking expeditions. It pioneered the chronograph calibre for wristwatches.

If you know your Omega history, that sounds almost like a carbon copy, because these two were duking it out for the top. It’s a shame Longines lost out in the 21st century—but that doesn’t stop it being mighty cool.

Coolness can be fragile and fleeting, and maybe in the future the combination of these shapes, materials and colours will no longer be cool, but for right now, for £2,570, this is one of the best value, personality rich watches you can get. It won’t be for everyone—and that’s a good thing. Something inoffensive enough to be loved universally can almost always be collectively termed as bland. This Longines Legend Diver in bronze is anything but.

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