Watches & Wonders 2024: Tudor Black Bay 58 GMT Features New METAS Caliber

Watches & Wonders Geneva, the world’s largest and most important gathering of luxury watch brands, kicks off its 2024 edition today, boasting more than 50 exhibitors. Among them is Tudor, which has introduced the first GMT timepiece in its popular Black Bay 58 series. We take a look at it below.

The Background: The Black Bay collection has been the undisputed flagship of the modern Tudor portfolio since its introduction in 2012. Its appeal to collectors springs from its elegantly melded hodgepodge of elements from several different iterations of the brand’s fondly remembered dive watch, the Oyster Prince Submariner. These include the so-called “snowflake” hour hand, drawn from the Submariner Ref. 7016 from 1969, and the large screw-down crown, with engraved Tudor rose emblem, from the 1958 "Big Crown" model. The geometrical hour markers — round dots and rectangles, with a dominant inverted triangle at 12 o’clock — are derived from Tudor Submariners on the market in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Tudor introduced the first Black Bay GMT in 2018, taking the classical design of the Rolex GMT-Master (made by Tudor’s parent company) and giving it a contemporary spin that is also distinctly 21st-Century Tudor. While the Black Bay GMT owes an obvious aesthetic debt to Rolex’s iconic travel watch, it also fits firmly within the design language of the Black Bay, with its bezel sporting a bicolor 24-hour ring on which the wearer can read a second time zone thanks to the dial’s GMT hand. The famous bright red-and-blue “Pepsi” bezel of Rolex’s original GMT-Master is here slightly modified to a more muted indigo-and-burgundy combo. Last year, Tudor expanded the collection with a silvery-grained white-dial version in its original case size of 41mm. 

What’s New: For the first time, a GMT model joins the versatile, mega-popular subfamily of the Black Bay, the Black Bay 58, which derives its name from the year Tudor released the historic Oyster Prince Submariner Ref. 7924, the purest forerunner of the modern Black Bay, and which has found favor among enthusiasts for its understated 39mm case diameter. The steel case of the Black Bay 58 GMT will fit the bill for many wearers with its 12.8mm thickness and 47.8mm lug-to-lug measurement. Its bicolor 24-hour bezel (here in a new burgundy-and-black combo) has a glossier finish for a more vibrant aesthetic, the “snowflake” handset has added layers of Super-LumiNova for legibility, and the movement inside is the automatic Caliber MT5440-U, boasting both a COSC certification as well as a METAS certification as a “Master Chronometer; its power reserve is 65 hours, just shy of the 70 hours offered by the non-GMT-equipped base caliber. The Black Bay 58 GMT comes on either a sporty black rubber strap or the classic Tudor riveted steel bracelet.

How much and when? The Tudor Black Bay 58 GMT retails for $4,400 on a rubber strap and for $4,600 on a steel bracelet. The watch is available in April, launching concurrently with its reveal at Watches & Wonders 2024.