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 in addition to, you might 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 is just not 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 your entire watch business, and it did so in considered one of its least-heralded fashions: the Oyster Perpetual. The concept was so easy that we’ve barely observed it turn into the business norm: As a substitute of slowly rolling out new dial colors one by one over a interval of years—which was customary watch world conduct till that time—Rolex launched a complete set of coloured dials in a complementary palette unexpectedly.
They have been vivid, daring and nearly childlike of their purity: coral purple, 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 Nineteen Eighties—equally vivid and sudden, and evocative of a louche, sybaritic age. However there was one thing extra primary, extra important and, no less than theoretically, extra attainable in regards to 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 chrome steel sports activities watches.
Earlier this yr, Oris’s Huge Crown Pointer Date hit the same word. In 2023, arch-rival Omega debuted a set of Seamaster Aqua Terra fashions with comparable hues to Rolex’s opening salvo; different mid-level manufacturers together with Breitling and TAG Heuer have all created multi-colored households of chrome steel, time-only spherical watches in the same mildew.
