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 in addition to, you may 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 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 artistic selections throughout your entire watch trade, 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 turn into the trade norm: As a substitute of slowly rolling out new dial colors one by one over a interval of years—which was normal watch world conduct till that time—Rolex launched an entire set of coloured dials in a complementary palette all of sudden.
They had been vibrant, daring and nearly 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 Eighties—equally vibrant and surprising, and evocative of a louche, sybaritic age. However there was one thing extra fundamental, extra important and, at the very least 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 instance: a full set of daring, block-colour dials in in any other case conventional stainless-steel sports activities watches.
Earlier this yr, Oris’s Huge Crown Pointer Date hit an analogous observe. 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 stainless-steel, time-only spherical watches in an analogous mildew.
