As the corporate that both invented or popularized the dive watch, the GMT watch, the primary water resistant watch, the primary automated watches, and far more in addition to, you possibly 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 is just not 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 inventive choices throughout your entire watch business, and it did so in considered one of its least-heralded fashions: the Oyster Perpetual. The thought was so easy that we’ve barely observed it develop into the business norm: As an alternative of slowly rolling out new dial colors one after the other over a interval of years—which was commonplace watch world conduct till that time—Rolex launched a complete set of coloured dials in a complementary palette all of sudden.
They have 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 Nineteen Eighties—equally brilliant and surprising, and evocative of a louche, sybaritic age. However there was one thing extra fundamental, extra important and, at the least theoretically, extra attainable in regards to the Oyster Perpetual assortment.
It sparked imitators left, proper and heart—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 stainless-steel sports activities watches.
Earlier this 12 months, Oris’s Massive Crown Pointer Date hit the same word. In 2023, arch-rival Omega debuted a group 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 stainless-steel, time-only spherical watches in the same mould.
