Deep-X
Watch Insanity was founded in Milan at the end of 2015 by Jacopo Giudici, going online in early 2016; the Deep-X was commissioned to mark its tenth anniversary, its name deliberately built around the Roman numeral for ten. Conceived as a collective project rather than a single workshop's output, the watch carries no logos or text on its dial at all — a deliberate statement, in the brand's words, that independent watchmaking doesn't need labels to be recognised. It is also, genuinely, entirely made in Italy down to the movement itself, a claim the brand frames as a tribute to Italy's often under-credited role throughout the Swiss watch industry's own supply chain.
The case comes from Riccardo Paradisi, whose eponymous workshop is known for ultra-water-resistant sports watches: grade 23 titanium, 43mm across and 12mm thick, weighing just 50 grams despite its 2,000-metre water resistance, with a flat sapphire crystal, a hand-polished, sunray-finished bezel, a sapphire display caseback, and a pin buckle hand-engraved with the Deep-X logo. It ships in Paradisi's signature solid aluminium ingot, anodised and customised specifically for this project.
The dial is the work of Carmelo Amalfi, working under the name BludiMelo, a designer whose career spans major Swiss maisons and independent brands alike. Its forged carbon surface is left free of any text, its polished hour markers arranged in a continuous circular pattern beneath sword-shaped, white Super-LumiNova hands — except for one: a single luminous marker on each watch is coloured blue instead of white, corresponding to that piece's individual number among the ten, visible only in darkness. The marker at 12 o'clock carries a mother-of-pearl insert echoed on the crown, a quiet nod to the watch's diving character.
Its movement carries real historical weight. OISA 1937 was a genuine Italian manufacture, producing thousands of movements a month in Lombardy through the 20th century before falling dormant for decades; it resumed operations in 2021 in Albuzzano, near Pavia, under Benedetto Perrotta, specifically to bring high-grade mechanical production back to Italy. For the Deep-X, OISA built its five-bridge Calibre 29-50 exclusively for Watch Insanity — an extra-flat, hand-wound movement with over 60 hours of reserve and a declared daily accuracy of ±5 seconds, finished with ruthenium treatment, bas-relief decoration across all five bridges, anglage, perlage, and a sunray-finished ratchet wheel, visible through that sapphire caseback — a genuinely rare feature on a watch rated to 2,000 metres, where such depths typically demand a solid back for structural integrity.
The strap comes from Principe 1940, a Milanese leather house with decades of work for major watchmaking and jewellery maisons, in a waterproof, textile-textured polymer with hand-painted edges and black-on-black stitching; the bespoke packaging, by Ondultecnica Lombarda, is paired with an accompanying book chronicling the project's creation. Limited to ten numbered pieces at 5,900 euros, the Deep-X was exhibited at GMT Great Masters of Time on Via della Spiga in Milan — a retailer with its own notable history in independent watchmaking, founded by the Corvo family, whose patriarch Giorgio Corvo helped revive the Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso in the 1970s.