Rolex sibling Tudor gets the Barbie makeover with pink Black Bay

The Black Bay Chrono ‘Pink’ might not be for everyone, and that’s OK because few of them will ever be made,” goes Tudor’s press release, which could well be suffixed with the words, “I’m just Ken (and I’m enough) and I’m great at doing stuff.”

Greta Gerwig has a lot to answer for, from Ken himself (Ryan Gosling) rocking his blushed-up TAG Heuer Carrera all over the red carpet during awards season, to Idris Elba billboarding Gucci’s 25H in matching pink dinner suit.

Tudor is the latest to join the fray with unabashed femininity, facelifting its professional-spec, chronograph-equipped diving watch.

Historically, of course, pink was the colour of choice for the ‘man’s man’, associated with flushfaced vim and vigour. It was only the rise of socially progressive nurseries and orphanages in the inter-war years that switched the script. Ladies’ Home Journal published an article in 1918 claiming, “the generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls,” since the shade of red was considered too harsh for girls, assigned instead with a colour associated with sky and daylight.

“When the leader of the Giro d’Italia puts on the pink jersey, there is no hesitation,” Tudor attests, “and when David Beckham [another high-profile brand partnership for Rolex’s affordable offshoot] dreamed up Inter Miami CF, pink was incorporated into the team’s aesthetic because they had to stand out.”

Whatever your leanings, the Black Bay Chrono Pink is a welcome addition to this year’s playful, ‘fun’ trend in watchmaking. A trend writ large throughout the halls of Geneva’s Palexpo convention centre last week, where the great and the good of Swiss timekeeping gathered for the 2024 edition of ‘Watches & Wonders’.

With all the vintage ’60s motifs that Tudor’s ‘Black Bay’ line draws on, as once endorsed by France’s military frogmen, its winding barrel boasts a brawny 70 hours of Kenergy, eked out by a ticking balance spring in antimagnetic silicon.

Tudor’s ‘MT5813’ tune-up of Breitling’s in-house stopwatch-function ‘B01’ workhorse comes from just up the road in the Jura mountains, which then goes a little further down the road upon casing-up, to the official Swiss Chronometer Testing Institute (COSC), where each watch’s daily rate variance exceeds the baseline at –2/+4 seconds, over –4/+6.

More than Kenough, hey Barbie?

•Tudor Black Bay Chrono ‘Pink’ in steel available in limited numbers from boutiques now, £4,790, tudorwatch.com