As the corporate that both invented or popularized the dive watch, the GMT watch, the primary water resistant watch, the primary computerized watches, and rather more moreover, you can hardly downplay Rolex’s affect on watchmaking historical past. However whereas its iconic sports activities watches, just like the Submariner, Daytona and GMT-Grasp are endlessly imitated, Rolex isn’t seen as a trendsetter, preferring to disregard passing horological fashions. It does its personal factor, iterating rigorously and minimally on its age-old templates.
5 years in the past, nonetheless, Rolex launched a set so avant-garde that’s nonetheless influencing inventive selections throughout the whole watch trade, and it did so in one among its least-heralded fashions: the Oyster Perpetual. The concept was so easy that we’ve barely observed it develop into the trade norm: As an alternative of slowly rolling out new dial colors separately over a interval of years—which was commonplace watch world conduct till that time—Rolex launched an entire set of coloured dials in a complementary palette unexpectedly.
They had been brilliant, daring and virtually childlike of their purity: coral crimson, inexperienced, turquoise, pink and yellow. Rolex-watchers instantly hailed them as a tribute to the so-called Stella dial Day-Date watches of the late Nineteen Seventies and Eighties—equally brilliant and surprising, and evocative of a louche, sybaritic age. However there was one thing extra primary, extra important and, a minimum of theoretically, extra attainable concerning the Oyster Perpetual assortment.
It sparked imitators left, proper and middle—and nonetheless does. Ultimately week’s Geneva Watch Days 2025, Zenith’s collaboration with Swiss furniture-maker USM would qualify as a textbook instance: a full set of daring, block-colour dials in in any other case conventional stainless-steel sports activities watches.
Earlier this 12 months, Oris’s Large Crown Pointer Date hit the same word. In 2023, arch-rival Omega debuted a set of Seamaster Aqua Terra fashions with related hues to Rolex’s opening salvo; different mid-level manufacturers together with Breitling and TAG Heuer have all created multi-colored households of stainless-steel, time-only spherical watches in the same mildew.
