My Favre-Leuba Deep Blue

It's common knowledge that I started making watch straps because of a life-long fascination with watches. I've been collecting from a young age, and although my collection spans several genres, one has always held my attention more than any other: mechanical dive watches from the mid-1960s and 1970s.

I thought I would write this blog post about one of the watches in my collection that probably gets more comments than anything else I own — my Favre-Leuba Deep Blue, model 59973. A bold looking watch, but to understand why it looks the way it does, you have to understand what was happening in watch design in the fifteen or so years after 1965 — a period that, for my money, produced the most interesting-looking watches ever made.

 

A design free-for-all

For most of the twentieth century, watches were conservative objects: round cases, white or black dials, restrained typography. Then, from the mid-1960s onward, that all changed — and changed fast.

Case shapes broke away from "round" entirely. Brands started experimenting with tonneau (barrel), cushion, and asymmetric cases, along with heavier, more sculptural proportions. Colour arrived, loudly — dials that had been silver or black for decades suddenly turned orange, electric blue, sunburst grey. It tracked the wider mood of the era; the same visual confidence you saw in fashion and graphic design of the time started showing up on wrists too.

Brands began racing each other for a signature look rather than just a reliable movement. A watch's shape and personality became as important a selling point as its accuracy, and the entire industry chased distinctiveness at once.

 

Why dive watches became the battleground

A huge amount of this creative energy landed specifically on dive watches — and that's where Jacques Cousteau comes into the story.

Cousteau co-invented the Aqua-Lung in 1943, the device that essentially created scuba diving as a practical, repeatable activity rather than a dangerous novelty. But the bigger cultural shift came later, through his films and television. The Silent World won the Palme d'Or and an Academy Award in the 1950s, and his television series, which ran from the late 1960s into the mid-1970s, brought underwater exploration into tens of millions of living rooms every week. For an entire generation, Cousteau more or less was the ocean on screen.

That mattered enormously for watchmakers. Recreational diving went from a niche, semi-military activity to a genuinely popular hobby almost overnight, and every ordinary diver now needed real, functional gear — including a watch that could survive the depths and let them read elapsed time underwater. Suddenly there was a large, enthusiastic, image-conscious customer base for tool watches, and brands fell over themselves to serve it.

That's the environment my Deep Blue was born into. Favre-Leuba had already built genuine diving credibility — the Deep Blue launched around 1963–64 with 200 metres of water resistance, among the deepest ratings of any diver at the time — but the design language that followed in the years after leaned hard into the boldness the era demanded: that orange rotating bezel, the oversized lume-filled markers, a dial built to be legible and unmistakable at a glance, whether you were forty feet under or across a room.

 

What's under the caseback

The bold looks weren't the whole story, though — there's genuine engineering behind them too.

Flip mine over and the caseback is stamped "Super Water Resistant, Swiss Made," the Favre-Leuba hourglass crest, and "50 ATU Duomatic" — roughly 500 metres of water resistance, an aggressive rating even by the standards of a decade that loved big numbers on casebacks.

"Duomatic" isn't just a name, either. Favre-Leuba spent the 1960s developing extra-thin, twin-barrel movements — first hand-wound, then automatic from 1968 — and pop the hood on mine and you can see it clearly: two mainspring barrels sitting side by side, rather than the single barrel most automatics of the era relied on. Two barrels working together generally means steadier torque delivery to the escapement as the mainsprings unwind, which helps keep timekeeping consistent, along with a healthier power reserve.

Pull the movement fully and the calibre marking becomes legible: FL1134, part of Favre-Leuba's family of twin-barrel automatics from the same era as the better-documented FL1153 and FL1162 calibres. It's a nice reminder that this watch wasn't coasting purely on a striking dial and a loud bezel — the brand was putting real, comparatively ambitious mechanical engineering into it too.

 

The quiet irony

Here's the part I find genuinely fascinating: this whole explosion of confident, expressive mechanical watch design happened just before the industry nearly got wiped out. Quartz movements arrived commercially in December 1969, and through the 1970s the traditional Swiss watchmaking industry was devastated by what became known as the "Quartz Crisis", forcing closures and mergers across many well established brands.

So in a strange way, watches like my Deep Blue are a snapshot of an industry at its most creatively confident, made in the years right before that confidence was tested by technology nobody in 1965 saw coming. Mechanical watchmaking wouldn't find its footing again as a craft and luxury category until the 1980s.

Favre-Leuba felt that shift more than most. The quartz crisis hit hard enough that in 1985, after eight generations, the Favre family had to sell the business they'd run since 1737. What followed was decades of changing hands and quiet spells, with a few attempts along the way to bring the name back.

It's only very recently that Favre-Leuba has properly returned. In 2024, under industry veteran Patrik Hoffmann, the brand relaunched at Geneva Watch Days with three new collections, including a modern take on the Deep Blue itself. It's a nice thought that the watch on my wrist and the watches now coming out of the revived company share the same name and the same design DNA, separated by over half a century.

Why it still matters to me

I make leather watch straps for a living, and after twenty years in this trade, many watches can start to blur together a bit — good proportions, sensible finishing, familiar shapes. The Deep Blue never blurs. Every time I wear it, I'm reminded of a moment when watchmakers were bold — willing to be a little strange, a little loud, and completely unafraid of standing out. They were riding a cultural wave that, in no small part, one adventurous Frenchman and his diving crew helped set in motion.