As the corporate that both invented or popularized the dive watch, the GMT watch, the primary waterproof watch, the primary computerized watches, and rather more apart from, 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 will not be 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, nevertheless, Rolex launched a set so avant-garde that’s nonetheless influencing inventive choices throughout all the watch trade, and it did so in one in every of its least-heralded fashions: the Oyster Perpetual. The concept was so easy that we’ve barely seen it turn out to be the trade 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 all of sudden.
They have been shiny, 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 Seventies and Nineteen Eighties—equally shiny and sudden, and evocative of a louche, sybaritic age. However there was one thing extra fundamental, extra important and, a minimum of 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 Large Crown Pointer Date hit an analogous notice. 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.