Panerai’s New Releases Are Sturdy, Stylish, and Seaworthy
Welcome to a special Watches and Wonders edition of Dialed In, Esquire’s column bringing you horological happenings and the most essential news from the watch world. As the show takes place in Geneva, we’ll keep you up-to-date on the biggest makers’ biggest releases of 2024.
Strolling past the Panerai stand on day one of Watches and Wonders, you’ll have no trouble guessing the main theme of the brand’s 2024 collection. Strung up above the hospitality space is LEQ12 Luna Rossa, the latest prototype of Team Prada Pirelli’s latest foil-racing America’s Cup yacht. Weighing in at 1,200kg, it’s the nth iteration of Luna Rossa since way back in the late nineties, when Prada CEO Patrizio Bertelli was first bitten with the bug for snatching the most storied trophy in sailing history for Italy. This one was shipped more than one thousand kilometers from the Prada Pirelli base in Cagliari, Sardinia.
Panerai has been furnishing special-edition watches inspired by Luna Rossa Pirelli since 2019. The alliance between Panerai and a sailing team at the very sharp end of sailing technology is fitting. In the past decade or so, technological advances have seen America’s Cup racing go from the sedate speeds of yesteryear to nudging fifty knots per hour. Much of the exponential acceleration and the attendant thrills and spills have come from adopting cutting-edge materials and the foiling technology that lifts the entire boat out of the water, nullifying the effects of friction from the waves. The trick is keeping it up there.
To celebrate the collaboration, which kicks off in late summer, Panerai has unveiled a slew of special-edition Luna Rossa Submersible watches playing to the breadth of its own position as a laboratory for innovative material science. Some of these are still under wraps, but four were unveiled today.
In no particular order (but beginning with our favorite), there is reference PAM01507, a 42mm titanium Submersible GMT that is water resistant to five hundred meters. Its 5T Titanium, which features in critical places on the Luna Rossa yacht, too, is 40 percent lighter and 60 percent stronger than steel. In this version, it has a pleasingly industrial matte surface matched by a matte blue ceramic bezel.
The white dial PAM01543, on the other hand, is a 44mm Submersible made from a state-of-the-art alloy of titanium and ceramic called Ti-Ceramitech with a fetchingly nautical, blueish-gray hue about it. A similar version, PAM01466, has a dark-blue dial.
Bringing up the rear is the skeletonized PAM01405, the most out-there of the set. It’s a 45mm tourbillon GMT and an “Experience Edition” (limited to twenty pieces). The experience part of the name denotes that if you have the wherewithal (a lot of wherewithal) to own one, you get to live a related experience as part of the deal—we presume, in this instance, that means messing about in sailboats. It’s the latest in a series of customer-experience watches that, in just a few years, created an eager subset of Panerai nuts vying to bag a special-edition piece and live its associated real-life expression.
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