As the corporate that both invented or popularized the dive watch, the GMT watch, the primary waterproof watch, the primary automated watches, and far more in addition to, you 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 isn’t 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, nevertheless, Rolex launched a group so avant-garde that’s nonetheless influencing artistic choices throughout all the watch business, and it did so in one among its least-heralded fashions: the Oyster Perpetual. The thought was so easy that we’ve barely observed it turn into the business norm: As a substitute of slowly rolling out new dial colors separately 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 vibrant, daring and virtually 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 vibrant and surprising, and evocative of a louche, sybaritic age. However there was one thing extra fundamental, extra important and, not less than theoretically, extra attainable concerning the Oyster Perpetual assortment.
It sparked imitators left, proper and middle—and nonetheless does. Finally week’s Geneva Watch Days 2025, Zenith’s collaboration with Swiss furniture-maker USM would qualify as a textbook example: a full set of daring, block-colour dials in in any other case conventional chrome steel sports activities watches.
Earlier this yr, Oris’s Big Crown Pointer Date hit an analogous be aware. 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 chrome steel, time-only spherical watches in a similar mold.
