A New Twist on the Ocean Inspired Dive Watch LE from Zenith and Topper

The last few weeks of the year are usually pretty quiet on the new release front, but there have been a handful of last minute limited editions come across the wires recently that are definitely of at least some interest. We just brought you news of a new Doxa LE from our friends at Topper Jewelers in Burlingame, CA, and in what amounts to an insanely quick turnaround, they’re back again with what surely has to be their final release of the year, a new collaboration with Zenith. This watch does one of my favorite things a watch can do, which is to completely hide its coolest feature most of the time, only allowing it to be visible under very specific conditions. It’s the same reason I love the less obvious and more subtle Grand Seiko dial textures – it’s the watch equivalent of a secret handshake. 

The Defy Extreme Diver Topper Edition is built on Zenith’s contemporary diver platform, an overengineered, 600 meter diver in the Defy line. Zenith has done a nice job of building out their diver selections in the last year or so, almost to the point where it’s hard to believe that they went so long without a true diver in the collection. At the moment,  enthusiasts have the choice between the Defy Extreme Diver like the one seen here, or an only slightly more sedate “Revival” diver that’s essentially a one to one recreation of a vintage reference. The shared DNA between the two is obvious, and the way Zenith has positioned these watches within their own catalog is one of the smarter things they’ve done recently, in my opinion. 

This new Topper Edition of the Defy Extreme Diver would at first glance appear to be a straightforward blue dialed variant of the watch with a pronounced horizontal dial texture that is meant to evoke the ocean. Well, stop the presses, we can hardly believe it. Blue divers designed to make us think of the sea is about as on the nose as it gets, and breaks no new ground whatsoever. But the party trick here comes into focus when the lights go off. Lume has been applied not just to the hands and indices, but in a speckled fashion throughout the dial itself. When fully charged, the effect is similar to that of the bioluminescence that can be observed in the ocean at night. For a Bay Area authorized dealer like Topper, this feels appropriate and tweaks the idea of an ocean inspired dial just enough. And the end result is a genuinely cool dial treatment that is essentially invisible most of the time, which for me has an inherent appeal. 

The Defy Extreme Diver is cased in titanium and measures 42.5mm across and 15mm thick. It runs on the El Primero 3620 caliber, a high frequency movement that in this version, as opposed to other divers in the same family, forgoes the date display. This is an incredibly smart decision on the part of Zenith and Topper. Normally I’m not a slave to the idea of an unobstructed dial and can understand the practicality of a date often wins out. But here, with the lume application appearing random and organic, a no date execution is absolutely the right call. 

The Defy Extreme Diver Topper Edition carries a retail price of $12,300. Like all other Defy Extreme Divers, Zenith ships it with a matching titanium bracelet, a rubber strap, and a fabric pass-through strap. This edition is limited to 50 pieces. Zenith

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