Omega launches the Planet Ocean at Tate Modern

A dive watch, presented in a gallery

On 30 April 2026 Omega brought the launch of its redesigned Seamaster Planet Ocean to London and staged it in the Tanks, the raw concrete chambers beneath Tate Modern. Seven versions of the fourth-generation collection were shown, in blue, black or orange, on rubber straps or steel bracelets. The guests were the British actor and Omega ambassador Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the French actor and Omega ambassador Pierre Niney, and the actors Connor Swindells, Tom Blyth, Jonah Hauer-King and Charlie Rowe. Raynald Aeschlimann, President and CEO of Omega, hosted.¹

There was no water in the room. For a collection whose full name carries the figure 600M, that is the first thing worth noticing about the evening.

Omega has held launches in boutiques, at trade fairs and beside water. Choosing a museum for a diving collection is a decision about who the watch is being introduced to, and the room answered the question before anybody spoke.The reclassification, stated by the brand itself

Most repositioning has to be read off the work. This one was said out loud. "The Planet Ocean began life as an underwater timepiece but has evolved into one of our most attractive lifestyle pieces," Aeschlimann told the room.¹

That sentence moves the watch out of one category and into another, and it does so in the CEO's own words rather than a journalist's. A dive watch is judged against a specification: depth rating, bezel, legibility, helium valve. A lifestyle piece is judged against a wardrobe. The first comparison set is small, technical and shared with a handful of rivals. The second is enormous, and competing in it means competing on desirability rather than on metres.

The gain is reach. A watch that only makes sense to divers sells to divers. The cost is that the specification stops doing the persuading, and something else has to take over the job, which is what the rest of the evening was arranged to supply.

Two leading men for one collection

The global campaign behind the launch, announced on 18 November 2025, is led by two brand ambassadors rather than one: Glen Powell wears the Planet Ocean in its signature orange, Aaron Taylor-Johnson the new blue.²

Splitting a single collection across two faces is a deliberate choice, and it follows from the colours. A dive watch in orange and the same dive watch in blue are not two product variants in this telling but two different propositions, and each gets its own person to embody it. A single ambassador would have had to carry both, which flattens the range back into one idea. Two ambassadors let the collection be read as a set of options rather than a single object with finishes.

It also spreads the risk that comes with the format. An identity fastened to one person moves when that person moves. Two loosen the knot without abandoning the method.

Taylor-Johnson described the arrangement in terms of duration rather than a single campaign: "I've formed a very strong partnership with OMEGA, grounded in our shared passion for detail and quality."¹

Detail and quality are terms that belong to a watch on a wrist rather than to one at depth, and they are the terms a lifestyle piece is bought on. The ambassador and the CEO were describing the same repositioning in different vocabularies on the same evening.

The 1932 line does the work the depth rating used to do

The Planet Ocean is a young collection. It launched in 2005, and the model shown at Tate Modern is its fourth generation.² That is a thin heritage to sell against Swiss rivals who count in centuries, and Omega does not sell against it. It reaches further back instead. "The ocean has been an inspiration to OMEGA since we created our first diving watch in 1932," Aeschlimann said when the campaign launched.²

The claim is about the company, not the collection, and it is doing something specific. Once the product has been reclassified as a lifestyle piece, the technical argument can no longer carry the credibility on its own. 94 years of diving watches can, and it transfers to a watch worn to dinner exactly as well as to one worn at depth, because the point is no longer what the wearer will do with it.

What the Tanks buy

A boutique launch reaches buyers. A gallery reaches a wider public through the pictures it produces, and the Tanks in particular carry an association no showroom can rent: contemporary art, industrial concrete, a building people visit for reasons unconnected to shopping.

The guest list points the same way. Six actors, no divers, no expedition partner, no demonstration of what the name promises. Omega spent the evening arguing that the watch belongs on a wrist in London, and every element of the staging agreed with the argument. The depth rating is still printed on the dial. It is simply no longer the reason the room was full.