I have a sort of thesis about Bell & Ross, which is that the company has gone through three distinct incarnations. In the first, it made a fairly wide range of straightforward, technically appealing tool watches, including aviation watches, diver's watches, and so on (no doubt owing partly to the fact that Sinn was an early manufacturing partner). The most representative watch of this era was probably the Hydromax, which was a relatively slim diver's watch with an almost brutally straightforward design, which also had an 11,000 meter depth rating (incredible but true) thanks to its silicone oil-filled case. In its second incarnation, Bell & Ross was a design house – specifically, a design house building on the indisputable commercial success of its BR series of cockpit-instrument inspired watches, which were not so much pilot's watches, as illustrations of pilot's watches (which is not a knock against them at all; the best of them are excellent examples of design clarity in combination with an unusual design language, which is nothing to sneeze at).