As the corporate that both invented or popularized the dive watch, the GMT watch, the primary water resistant watch, the primary automated watches, and way more moreover, 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 just isn’t seen as a trendsetter, preferring to disregard passing horological fashions. It does its personal factor, iterating fastidiously and minimally on its age-old templates.
5 years in the past, nonetheless, Rolex launched a group so avant-garde that’s nonetheless influencing artistic choices throughout all the watch trade, and it did so in one in all its least-heralded fashions: the Oyster Perpetual. The thought was so easy that we’ve barely observed it turn into the trade norm: As an alternative of slowly rolling out new dial colors one after the other over a interval of years—which was normal watch world habits till that time—Rolex launched a complete set of coloured dials in a complementary palette abruptly.
They have been vibrant, daring and nearly 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 Nineteen Eighties—equally vibrant and sudden, and evocative of a louche, sybaritic age. However there was one thing extra primary, extra important and, at the least theoretically, extra attainable concerning the Oyster Perpetual assortment.
It sparked imitators left, proper and middle—and nonetheless does. Eventually 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 12 months, Oris’s Large Crown Pointer Date hit the same notice. In 2023, arch-rival Omega debuted a group 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 chrome steel, time-only spherical watches in the same mildew.
