Hands On: The Zenith A384 ‘Tropical’ Revival, And The Importance Of El Primero

This year, Zenith released a new version of the A384 Revival, which has been made in a number of different variations ever since the first model was launched in 2019 for the 50th anniversary of the El Primero caliber. The A384 Chronomaster was the first Zenith model to house this groundbreaking movement and today, the Revival is one of Zenith’s most popular models, thanks to the strong design identity of the case and bracelet. The latest version for this year is the Chronomaster Revival A384 Tropical, whose name refers to the faded chocolate color which vintage watch dials can develop from prolonged exposure to sunlight. Such dials are called “tropical” dials and while in decades past, such sun-faded dials would have been refinished or replaced, today they’re highly valued by collectors for their connection to watchmaking history.

The A384 Tropical obviously doesn’t have a dial which was faded to its color by the Sun over the passage of many years, but between the case design, “ladder” style bracelet, and use of matching lume on the hands and markers, it does an excellent job of creating the impression you might get from a 1969 El Primero if it were somehow in absolutely mint condition. Zenith’s various A384 models have been done in a wide range of executions, including the exotic “Lupin the Third” models, which were based on a watch worn by the character Daisuke Jigen in the Lupin the Third manga, but for the Tropical, Zenith has kept closely to the original design.

The ladder style bracelet is so-called thanks to the rectangular openings in the bracelet which alternate with steel middle links, which gives the bracelet the appearance of a stylized ladder. The original ladder bracelet was made for Zenith in 1969 by Gay Frères. one of the most famous independent bracelet makers in the Swiss watch industry at one time (Gay Frères was acquired by Rolex in 1998). The ladder bracelet can be polarizing, but it is of course a genuinely authentic and period correct part of the design, and it’s very comfortable to wear, especially in warm weather when the ladder openings give you a little ventilation.

The case geometry for the A384 was very unusual in 1969, and it’s still very striking today, with sharp crisp transitions between the brushed and polished surfaces. At 37mm in diameter, the A384 Tropical may seem a little small for modern tastes by the numbers, but the presence it projects thanks to the assertive case design and unusual bracelet more than make up for it.

The question came up for me several times while I was working with the watch, as to whether or not this could be described as a “pre-aged” dial and of course, whether or not you could say the same about the dial and hands and indexes as well. The term “fauxtina” is sometimes used disparagingly for watches whose dials, hands, and dial furniture have been designed to look like those you’d find on decades old, worn-hard-and-put-away-wet vintage watches. In this case however, I think the effect is pretty subtle. The echoes of the past are present but the overall color scheme, anchored by the red chronograph center seconds hand, works just fine purely as a combination of shapes and colors in a modern watch and while the shoutout to the original from 1969 is pleasing and apt for the design, it’s not overbearing and you don’t need to know what a “tropical” dial is to find this a handsome watch in its own right.

The evolution of collector tastes in tropical dials has been covered many times but I think Tony Traina’s article on his Substack, Unpolished Watches, gives a great summary of how these dials became coveted by collectors. In his story (paywalled) “When Damage Became Tropical” he quotes William Massena (the founder of Massena labs among many, many other things) on how they became desirable to collectors; Massena says:

“In the late 1990s, [tropical dials] were still considered damaged, then the rise of quality pictures on forums started to make us realize that it was a very similar and specific mark within Rolex and Omega. Gradually with digital camera pic quality improving, we saw that it really was a phenomenon across a wide range of brands. I think the term Tropical was invented by dealers because brown sounded bad.”

One man’s brown is another man’s tropical.

The significance of the El Primero Caliber

The El Primero caliber’s story has, like that of tropical dials, also been told many times, including the story of how Zenith’s Charles Vermot refused the owner’s order to destroy the tooling for the movement during the Quartz Crisis, and how a detuned version of the EP came to be used in the Daytona. What is perhaps sometimes less often appreciated is just how revolutionary the El Primero was, and how unusual its approach is even today.

Prior to 1969, automatic chronographs did not exist. There appear to have been experiments prior to that year – Lemania produced an automatic chronograph prototype in the late 1940s, for instance, but it never went into production. The fact that every other complication had been developed before automatic chronographs came along, should tell you something about how difficult the problem was – the minute repeater, chronograph, rattrapante chronograph, flyback chronograph, minute repeater, grande et petite sonnerie, world timer, and GMT complication all appeared years and in some cases, many decades before something we take for granted today.

The three automatic chronographs introduced that year were the Seiko caliber 6139, the Heuer/Buren/Breitling/Dubois Depraz micro-rotor Caliber 11, and, of course, the El Primero. Each one of them brought something different to the table: the Seiko, a vertical clutch system; the Caliber 11, a microrotor winding system; and the El Primero, a balance beating at 36,000 vph/5Hz. The El Primero’s frequency meant that it could time intervals to a precision of 1/10th of a second, and it was at the time, the only chronograph in the world which operated at a high frequency.

The Rarity Of High Frequency Chronographs

Now, fifty seven years after it first launched, the El Primero still doesn’t have very much in the way of competition. High beat chronographs are extremely rare – Grand Seiko’s Tentagraph is one example, and there’s also the Breguet Type XXII, but there are precious few others over the entire period of almost six decades since the El Primero launched. Of the three “firsts” from 1969, the El Primero is also the only one still in production, albeit there was a prolonged pause in production during the Quartz Crisis.

The modern version of the El Primero has been rationalized for ease of servicing – the original version, for instance, had dozens of different screw sizes while the modern version has just a handful – but it is without a doubt, a one-of-a-kind stalwart and survivor: one of those movements that any serious enthusiast should know about, and if possible, experience in person.

As you can see, the Tropical version of the A384 revival is no mere homage to the past. It is in fact, the past brought forward and into the present, and it’s an example of one of the smartest things I think a watch manufacturer can do. Every real historical brand has models in its back catalog which represent its most fundamental values, both technically and aesthetically, and one of the most important things for a brand to do is to make sure that its fans can have an actual, physical, tangible experience of that past, to see for themselves what it represents in the context of modern watchmaking.

It’s sometimes said that Zenith’s biggest challenge is that it doesn’t have an icon, it has a movement. But a movement like the El Primero is its own kind of icon and in the A380 Tropical, it becomes part of a whole greater than the sum of its parts: a physical manifestation of a moment in watchmaking history when one of the last great technical problems in watchmaking was finally conquered. And at 36,000 vph, no less.

The 1916 Company is proud to be an authorized retailer for Zenith Watches. For pricing and availability for the Chronomaster Revival A384 Tropical, please contact us.