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 apart from, you would 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 group so avant-garde that’s nonetheless influencing artistic selections throughout your entire watch business, and it did so in one in all its least-heralded fashions: the Oyster Perpetual. The thought was so easy that we’ve barely seen it grow to be the business norm: As an alternative 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 .
They had been shiny, 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 Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties—equally shiny 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 middle—and nonetheless does. Finally 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 Huge Crown Pointer Date hit an analogous 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 an analogous mould.