A Definitive Retro Dive Watch Is Back with More Vintage Vibes Than Ever

I have to admit, I’m kind of numb to vintage dive watch reissues at this point. So many have been released over the past decade that it’s hard to get excited when yet another reborn 1960s diver returns with a retro design and material upgrades.

But I still have a soft spot for some of these retro divers, and one of my biggest soft spots is reserved for the Oris Divers Sixty-Five, a remake of the independent brand’s original dive watch from 1965.

Maybe that’s because the first reissue of the watch debuted back in 2015, right around the time I first began my descent down the watch rabbit hole. Or maybe it’s because I’m obsessed with its quirky, almost tiki-like indices.

In any case, I love the original Divers Sixty-Five and I was disheartened to see it disappear from Oris’s catalog in recent years, effectively replaced by a more versatile but decidedly less funky Divers series.

But now, in honor of the original’s 60th anniversary, the original Oris dive watch is back. And it’s packing even more fun vintage details than its 2015 predecessor.

Oris

The 65, 60 Years On

Oris’s original dive watch debuted in 1965 and pretty perfectly captured the era — with a few quirks. Its black high-contrast dial and rotating bezel certainly fit the mold of your typical dive watch at the time, but it also stood out with its dramatic index design and bi-directional rather than uni-directional bezel.

The new 60th Anniversary Edition brings back these quirks. The bezel on the new watch is bi-directional — a feature that was absent from the 2015 reissue, mainly because actual dive watches require a uni-directional bezel as a safety feature. (Basically, you don’t want your bezel to get knocked and say you have more time left underwater than you actually do.)

But since Oris knows not many people will actually use this watch for diving, the brand has revived the bi-directional bezel as a fun nod to the past. I prefer bi-directional bezels for day-to-day use anyway, as they’re slightly quicker and easier to use. The new bezel also has a painted lume pip at 12 rather than a luminescent pearl, another 1965-accurate detail missing from the 2015 watch.

Oris

The 60th-anniversary watch’s dial is also more faithful to the original than the 2015 reissue. The lume-outlined tiki numerals at 12, 3, 6 and 9 are the same, thankfully, but the dial text is closer to what it was in the ’60s than in the ’10s.

It now displays “Anti-Shock” along with the jewel count at 6 o’clock — a very common practice for watches of the mid-century but one largely out of practice today. At 12 o’clock, there’s a vintage Oris logo, and most surprising of all, the word “Waterproof” appears just below that.

It used to be common practice for watches to declare themselves to be waterproof, but virtually none do so today. That’s because no watch is truly waterproof, they’re highly water resistant, and claiming to be waterproof opens brands up to lawsuits from ever-increasingly litigious customers.

Oris

Oris no doubt knows this — this is its first watch in many years to sport such a label — but I’m guessing the brand is betting the watch nerds who are likely to buy the Divers Sixty-Five 60th Anniversary Edition probably aren’t going to sue them.

The rest of the watch is less historically accurate but appeals to modern tastes. The case size is again 40mm, which is identical to the 2015 version but larger than the 36mm 1965 original. And the dial has no date, which was a feature on both the original vintage diver and the 2015 reissue. I like this move, as it gives more real estate to those awesome indices.

Pricing and Availability

Rounding out the specs, we’ve got a rivet-style bracelet and an additional black leather strap (I’d prefer rubber, tbh), a double-domed AR-coated sapphire crystal, and a Swiss-made Sellita-based automatic movement with the classic red Oris rotor hidden behind a special engraved caseback.

Oris’s prices have been climbing and climbing recently due to an upmarket push and increased R&D toward developing in-house movements, but the new Divers 65 reissue reverses this trend.

It’s priced at just $2,500, which is about a grand less than what I was expecting and makes it a serious bargain in the current luxury diver market. The watch is thankfully not limited and is available now from Oris.

Oris

Oris Divers Sixty-Five 60th Anniversary Edition

To mark 60 years since the release of its original dive watch from 1965, Oris launched this special anniversary edition of the Divers Sixty-Five complete with a retro dial and bi-directional bezel — just like on the original.

Specs

Case Size	40mm
Movement	Oris Cal. 733-1 automatic (Sellita base)
Water Resistance	100m

• $2,500 at Oris

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