LOUIS VUITTON Tambour STREET DIVER

“Ooh fashion” … don’t know why but every time I see this sort of thing, David Bowie’ s Fashion pops straight into my head. 

That’s because it’s a “fashion diver” I hear you say, and how right you are but does that mean we should just dismiss it? 

Yup, we probably should because this ain’t no diving icon – still funnily enough it will set you back just as much any number of wonderful Swiss made diver’s watches with true heritage and diving pedigree to boot.

However Louis Vuitton’s Tambour which first debuted in 2002 remains one of the brands most important timepieces. 

Over the years, the French high-fashion house has released their fair share of diver variants including THIS ONE with a diver down flag on its dial – who would have known. 

However for 2021, the Tambour Diver is looking to up its street cred with a new name and a new look.

Introducing the new Tambour Street Diver from Louis Vuitton, a watch like all watches bearing the Tambour name whose design is inspired by a drum giving rise to its unusual bottom-heavy shape. 

For 2021 the Tambour Street Diver has been released as a collection of four models each with its own unique look but are any of them up to the job?

At first glance there are one or two redeeming features; the dials for starters have highly readable layouts and boast high contrast colors and markings – credit where credit is due. 

If you look carefully you’ll see that LV have cleverly incorporated the “V” from LV into two key elements used for the reading of dive-time; the minuet hand and the timing bezel’s 12hr marker.

Meanwhile there still remains a hint of a diver-down flag on the sub-seconds dial at 6 o’clock. 

Then there’re the screw-down crowns one of which – the one that operates the watch’s internal dive-time bezel and which has been thoughtfully rubberized and signed with a cute SCUBA diver icon – these both look pretty ergonomically sound.

You’d have thought that with all diver-centric details thus far, that LV would just finished their diver’s watch off properly by giving it a screw-down case-back and a water-resistance exceeding 100m. 

Of course not, it’s a fashion diver after all. ;) But what do you think?

Variants shown include: 44mm Autos - Neon Black, Skyline Blue, Blaze Black and the 39.5mm Quartz Pacific White.