As the corporate that both invented or popularized the dive watch, the GMT watch, the primary waterproof watch, the primary automated watches, and way more apart from, you could possibly 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 set so avant-garde that’s nonetheless influencing artistic choices throughout the whole watch business, and it did so in certainly one of its least-heralded fashions: the Oyster Perpetual. The thought was so easy that we’ve barely observed it grow to be the business norm: As an alternative 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 an entire set of coloured dials in a complementary palette all of sudden.
They had been vivid, daring and nearly childlike of their purity: coral pink, 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 Seventies and Eighties—equally vivid and surprising, 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 stainless-steel sports activities watches.
Earlier this 12 months, Oris’s Massive Crown Pointer Date hit an analogous be aware. 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 stainless-steel, time-only spherical watches in an analogous mould.
