How a 2020 Rolex Collection Changed the Face of Watch Design Leave a comment
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 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 group so avant-garde that’s nonetheless influencing artistic choices throughout all the watch trade, and it did so in one among 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 after the other 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 had been vivid, 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 Seventies and Eighties—equally vivid and surprising, and evocative of a louche, sybaritic age. However there was one thing extra primary, extra important and, not less than theoretically, extra attainable concerning 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 chrome steel sports activities watches.
Earlier this yr, Oris’s Massive Crown Pointer Date hit an identical 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 chrome steel, time-only spherical watches in an identical mildew.
