Worn & Wound
Bell & Ross Expands their BR 03 Dive Watch Collection
Bell & Ross has significantly expanded their lineup of BR 03 divers this week, launching a total of five new references in the collection of sports watches inspired by aircraft instrumentation. The BR 03 line has been the subject of many incremental upgrades over the past year, and just as we saw with the pilot’s watches, these divers seem to be operating under the philosophy of “less is more” when it comes to making changes in the lineup. The BR 03, and Bell & Ross square watches in general, have always been a bit of a cult object, loved all out of proportion by their fans. The divers are a particularly strange subset within the product line. The “pilot” and “diver” aesthetics rarely match up, but there’s something almost logical here about an overbuilt, square watch designed to get wet. Somehow, we can take the instrument cluster aesthetic inspiration out of the equation once we’re told we’re dealing with a dive watch. What we’re left with is my favorite type of Bell & Ross: something that’s just simply and deeply strange, a watch that feels like it shouldn’t exist but has an obvious appeal anyway. The 42mm divers introduced this week come in five variants, which, as you’d expect, progress from fairly banal to positively strange. There are three steel references with white, blue, and black dials. These, as you can probably surmise, are the more straightforward watches in the collection. They have the same general appearance of an aviation ...
