For those of us still recovering from last Sunday’s epic Game of Thrones series finale, “Dark Admiral” might conjure up the image of some horrific villain from that fantasy series, but it is in fact a fitting nickname for a new timepiece from Corum, which unveiled its 2019 collections outside of Baselworld — specifically, for a limited edition of the Swiss brand’s Admiral Legend 42 in a sleek new black-on-black execution. Here’s a closer look at the new Admiral Legend 42 Full Black.
As longtime fans and followers of the Corum brand know, the Admiral’s Cup Legend, with its emblematic 12-sided case and hour markers represented by nautical pennants, is an evolution of the Admiral’s Cup models launched in 1983, which were themselves a contemporary redesign of the original, square-cased Admiral’s Cup from the 1960s, now regarded as an icon among yachting watches. Launched in 2010, the 50th anniversary year of that original watch, with a streamlined dodecagonal case measuring 42 mm in diameter and around 10 mm thick, the Legend 42 was designed to offer a more elegant size and silhouette than other Admiral’s Cup models, some of which reached diameters of 47 and even 48 mm. The Full Black model, which is limited to 100 pieces, keeps the understated dimensions but breaks with Corum’s tradition of using color for the nautical-flag markers in favor of black with gray-toned highlights. (Each numeral represented on the 12 pennants conforms to its equivalent in the International Code of Signals.) The case is made of black PVD-coated stainless steel (the first in the Admiral family of watches) while the dial is made of blackened brass.
The dial hosts a pair of skeletonized Dauphine-style hour and minute hands, finished in black PVD and filled with white Super-LumiNova. The date peeks out from a small window in the 3 o’clock pennant, and the running seconds are displayed on a subdial above 6 o’clock Inside the case is a self-winding movement, Corum’s Caliber CO 395, most likely ETA-based, beating at 28,800 vph, amassing a 42-hour power reserve, and on display behind a screw-down sapphire caseback. The watch — which is water-resistant to 50 meters and whose avant-garde, ebony colorways are inspired, Corum says, by the carbon hulls of modern yachts — is integrated into a vulcanized black rubber strap, embossed with Corum’s “key” logo, and fastens to the wrist with a black PVD-treated triple folding buckle.
