Take A Dive

How a revolutionary piece of aquatic equipment became an aspirational accessory

When Jacques-Yves Cousteau and engineer Emile Gagnan invented the aqua-lung in the 1940s, it revolutionised not only diving, but undersea exploration. Released from the restrictive tether of an air hose and heavy copper helmet, a diver could swim freely with only a tank, a mask, and a pair of ns, and the new sport of scuba diving was born. The innovation also created the need for a new kind of wristwatch, and within a few years the dive watch, as we know it, was also born.

It was 1953 when a trio of Swiss brands introduced the first dive watches: Zodiac’s Sea Wolf, Rolex’s Submariner, and Blancpain’s Fifty Fathoms. This year sees all three celebrating their 70th anniversary. Dive watches are as popular as ever, despite the fact they scarcely see the deep end of a swimming pool nowadays. So what is the allure? A good place to start is with the watch itself.

The original brief was simple. It had to be watertight, highly legible, and able to track elapsed time. It was — and still is — a simple creature with one job. All three of the first dive watches got it right at the outset, with rotating timing rings, luminous bold dials and hands, and well-sealed steel cases. The Sea Wolf claimed to be “Especially Waterproof “ to 200m, while the Fifty Fathoms was named for what was then considered the deepest a person could safely dive (92m). The Submariner, meanwhile, was based on Rolex’s already proven “Oyster” case, with its screwed-down caseback and winding crown. With a head start, these watches were favoured by navy divers, shipwreck hunters, and underwater explorers for decades.

By the mid-1960s, scuba technology was no longer only the domain of scientists and military frogmen. Diving’s popularity was booming, with TV shows such as Sea Hunt and James Bond films like Thunderball ring the imagination of adventurous viewers. Cousteau’s films and television programmes inspired a generation of divers, and the watches he and his crew wore became aspirational accessories. Brands duly responded with oversized, rugged watches that not only withstood the rigours of diving, but captured its essence. Almost every watch company had one to offer, with designs that claimed to make them more watertight or legible or perform dierent functions: the Aquastar Deepstar’s bezel could calculate decompression stages, while the Favre-Leuba Bathy tracked depth, and the Jaeger-LeCoultre Polaris sounded audible alarms.

In the late 1960s, Doxa released its Sub 300, with an innovative nodecompression scale engraved onto its bezel. It also boasted a clasp that expanded to t over a wetsuit sleeve and a bright orange dial, the rst of its kind. Other brands, including Certina and Jenny, followed with increasingly colourful dials and more daring designs. Omega branched off from its stalwart Seamaster, long the choice of Royal Navy divers, to introduce truly avant-garde case shapes, abyssal depth ratings, and vibrant blue dials. Dive watches weren’t just the province of the land-locked Swiss brands. In Japan, Citizen and Seiko created their own versions that were prized for their ruggedness and affordability. In the mid-1970s, Seiko introduced titanium and quartz movements in its dive watches, both groundbreaking features at the time. Titanium is ideal for subaquatic use due to its corrosion resistance, strength and light weight, while a battery-powered quartz movement was more accurate and less susceptible to damage. In the 1980s, Citizen developed the Aqualand, the first dive watch with an integrated electronic depth gauge, a timepiece that would become as much a symbol of a diver as a pair of aviator glasses are to a pilot.

In the 1980s another innovation changed diving forever. The digital d ive computer, worn on the wrist or on a tethered console, meant a diver could track his depth and time, along with other data, at a glance. No longer was an analogue watch and depth g auge necessary. It could have spelled an end to the dive watch’s popularity. But it didn’t.

While the dive computer meant fewer traditional watches were seen on divers’ wrists, it did, in essence, free the dive watch from a purely functional existence. Like a sea creature that crawled out of the ocean and grew legs, dive watches evolved into accessories for an adventurous life, and symbols of rugged capability. Its over-engineered features might not be tested on the ocean oor but a dive watch became a talisman of bravery that could imbue its owner with a little extra nerve when the going got rough, whether that be in the boardroom or up a mountain.

It is a different world today to that of 1953. We live in a time of increased complexity, automation, and programmed obsolescence. People seek tangible links to a simpler time, when people waxed their own cars, split wood for heat, and made things with their hands. It’s why workwear is popular, and vinyl records are back in vogue. A dive watch may be the ultimate expression of this, a sturdy object that has always done its job under difficult conditions, quietly and dependably. It is, in fact, a symbol of how we want to see ourselves. And that’s pretty deep.

For years bad skin blighted the life of Scarlett Johansson — which is why she’s now launching her own skincare line

WORDS: VASSI CHAMBERLAIN

Scarlett Johansson is sitting at a desk in the bedroom of her pretty, Marie Antoinette-style New York apartment, the walls covered in an eaude-nil wallpaper awash with pale golden fronds. Her Nordic blonde hair is pulled back and parted in the middle, and she’s wearing a grey crewneck jumper and large black reading glasses that frame the contours of her angelic face. She brings to mind the 17th-century Dutch maid she portrayed in Girl with a Pearl Earring, the 2003 film adaptation of Tracy Chevalier’s novel, itself inspired by Vermeer’s famous portrait, c 1665, who the art critic Alastair Sooke once described as having a face “as luminous as the moon in the night sky”. He might as well have been talking about Johansson.

“I’m re-entering the world after four months living in 1968 Cape Canaveral space-race world,” she says of Project Artemis, her production company’s latest film, in which she stars with Woody Harrelson and Channing Tatum.

Yet we are not here to talk movies, rather the launch of her own skincare brand, The Outset, co-founded with her business partner, the Californiaborn entrepreneur Kate Foster, who is also on our call and similarly ensconced in her New York bedroom, her dog lying on the bed behind her. The celebrity beauty brand market feels pretty crowded these days, I say. Can there really be room for yet another shouty launch? Plus, hasn’t she always eschewed the spotlight, choosing not to be on social media? Why now?

Johansson, 38, regards me attentively, almost scholarly like. “I was at my wits’ end,” she says, cradling her forehead in one hand, explaining how her teenage years and most of her twenties were blighted by severe acne. She grimaces remembering the moment a make-up artist on the set of 1998’s The Horse Whisperer remarked that her skin looked like an eruption on Mount Vesuvius.

“I was always being told my skin was dirty,” she says, “that I needed to clean it more. I used to go to Macy’s and buy endless products. For years I would go through cycles of drying out my skin, getting more breakouts, not using moisturiser. It was a chronic issue I couldn’t get a handle on, and I had access to great dermatologists.”

After years of frustration, particularly with how young girls are pushed into using increasingly complex and harsh ingredients to treat problem skin, she decided to do the one thing you are told to never do: use a moisturiser. “I’d never done that before because I was so terrified of any kind of oil.” Within a week her skin was looking so much better.

“I hadn’t had skin like that since I was 12. People would ask me if I’d just had a facial. I knew there was something there but I just couldn’t find a brand that had a cohesive regime.” She started thinking about creating her own skincare range, but with two important caveats: she didn’t want to license her own name or go down the white label route, ie using another company’s products for her brand. “I wanted to do it from scratch and I needed a producing partner.”

Just before lockdown she was introduced to Foster, who has always struggled with skin irritations herself and with whom she clearly gets on well, through a friend in the venture capital world. “I remember our first meeting was in your production office,” Foster says. Johansson immediately interjects: “But our first date was at that Aura Bar restaurant.” Do they remember what they both wore? “You had red lipstick on,” Johansson says. “Yes, I did,” Foster replies, “and probably the white buttondown shirt I am wearing now. I remember you had on some really awesome Gucci pants, like blue and eye-catching, and you’d obviously been there before because the waiter knew your drink.” They both laugh. Foster looks at me and says: “Scarlett likes a margarita.”

The pair bonded during Covid as mothers of young home schooled children. (Johansson married her third husband, Colin Jost, with whom she has a two-year-old son, in 2020. She also has an eight-year-old daughter from her second marriage, to the

French journalist/art curator Romain Dauriac, while Kate has a daughter and son, who are ten and seven.) “It was something to focus on other than having to explain what subtraction means,” Johansson says, rolling her eyes.

The Outset — the name reflects the skin regime you should adopt from a young age, or indeed at any age — is a simple but cohesive offering the pair tested endlessly on themselves, made up of soothing and clean ingredients that nourish rather than strip the skin’s natural barrier. The range consists of a micellar cleanser, serum, moisturiser, vitamin C eye cream, night cream, face oil, gentle exfoliator and a blue clay mask. The packaging is equally low-key and discreet: pale, smoky crystal bottles with pretty blue writing.

I wonder if having her own image constantly reflected back at her as an actress affected Johansson, yet she is refreshingly sanguine. “My job requires me to have an awareness, but I’m also free of the trappings of it at the same time,” she answers. “I don’t watch playbacks or look at pictures when I do shoots. I don’t want to see all the outtakes. It’s part of reason I don’t have social media. I’m self-aware enough to know your body and face changes, but that constant self-analysis is so counterproductive. I make an effort to not be hyperfocused on my appearance now, to be gentle and kind to myself because I’ve spent so long obsessing on the quality of my skin.”

They were surprised to discover early on that 30 per cent of their customer base is male, and both of their husbands now use The Outset diligently. “Scarlett’s vision was for it to be genderless,” Foster says, adding that her husband refused to post an online review until he had properly tried the products. Johansson’s husband loves the eye cream apparently. “I’d never used one before but he does all the time. So Colin has been our eye cream tester — he applies it every day,” she says, giggling sweetly.

I ask them what they make of Kate Moss, who last year debuted her own wellness brand, Cosmoss. “She’s so cool,” Johansson says immediately. “I don’t know her personally but everything I read about her, it’s like she’s always having a great time, she’s beautiful and carefree, like she knows there’s one chance on this earth and she’s taking advantage of that, and that’s wonderful.”

Beauty routines aside, do they subscribe to the current “feed your skin” nutritional supplements fad? “In the past I went on diets of turmeric, lemon juice or active charcoal, I did so many things like that but never found that it affected my skin much,” Johansson says. “I didn’t do dairy for years, but that didn’t make a difference either. The biggest thing is not drinking alcohol because it affects my sleep so much. It’s a hard thing to adopt because I like a glass of wine at the end of the day.”

I have one last question for them: are they good girls, do they take their make-up off religiously every night?

“Absolutely,” Foster says. I turn to Johansson. “Yes,” she says. “I might have had three margaritas but I will still do it, even after a premiere. And I floss!”

The Outset is available from cultbeauty.com

The collaboration between The Elder Statesman and Zegna both subverts and plays into traditional notions of Italian refinement