Longines Flagship Skin Diver reference 7982-20 with vintage Tropic strap

1960 | Stainless steel | Automatic | 38.0mm

The Longines Flagship line was introduced in the late 1950s as the maison's flagship dress proposition — but the 7982-20 demonstrates that the Flagship family had more range than its name might suggest. This Skin Diver variant grafts genuine dive watch credentials onto the Flagship platform: a combination that speaks to an era when Longines was building watches for people who actually used them, regardless of the collection they belonged to.

The black dial presents beautifully, with painted indices whose tritium lume has developed a rich vanilla patina — that warm, irreproducible colour that only honest decades of aging can produce. It is precisely the kind of detail that separates a watch with a genuine history from one without.

The steel case presents in good unpolished condition, retaining its original surfaces throughout. It wears on a period-correct Tropic rubber strap — the Swiss-made rubber strap that equipped countless dive watches of the 1960s and has since become a collector object in its own right. Finding one intact and paired with its original watch is increasingly uncommon.

A complete, characterful Longines — tool watch soul, Flagship pedigree.