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Panerai Adds Touch of Silver to Luminor Marina
News
Panerai Adds Touch of Silver to Luminor Marina
Dials, however, have been (in the main) black, blue, white or tobacco. The first, of course, is the colour found on all of the true military issue models, for the obvious reason that they were worn by sabotage teams not interested in being detected and betrayed by their watches. The last of the four colours pays homage to those early dials which have aged in the euphemistically named manner we now call “tropical”, Panerai cannily reissuing historically important models with a pre-aged look.
As for white and blue, the first dates back to the mid-1990s models, the pre-Richemont pieces that overlapped with both eras, both appearing on the original Mare Nostrums, while glossy white dials were also fitted to Luminors. Once the brand’s revival was fully under way, blue was also applied to the more macho variants, such as the big Luminor GMT, while the last couple of years have seen a plethora of blue-dialled models across the range.
Along with skeletonised Panerais, other oddities and specials have included models with green and matte charcoal grey dials, but now it’s time for a colour to be added to the regular catalogue which really shows how versatile the octogenarian design can be. Making its debut on the latest Panerai Luminor Marina is the new dial in brushed steel, and – once you get over the shock – it’s a stunner.
Its simplicity is deceptive. At first, you react as one does when seeing what seems to be a monochromatic presence, but then the highlights emerge. The classic Panerai numeral font, with the “6” that looks like the curl on Bill Haley’s forehead and the wide “12” are applied, as are the remaining bar indices; these are treated with luminous material. There’s no “3” because that position is occupied by a small date window, while the 9 o’clock location contains the small seconds. Here the watch exhibits a dash of rakishness, as the seconds hand is the same bright blue as found on the gorgeous Luminor Due.