{"id":142239,"date":"2025-09-14T00:59:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-14T00:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/142239\/"},"modified":"2025-09-14T00:59:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-14T00:59:07","slug":"how-a-2020-rolex-collection-changed-the-face-of-watch-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/142239\/","title":{"rendered":"How a 2020 Rolex Collection Changed the Face of Watch Design"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the company that either invented or popularized the dive watch, the GMT watch, the first water-resistant watch, the first automatic watches, and much more besides, you could hardly downplay Rolex<\/a>\u2019s influence on watchmaking history. But while its iconic sports watches, like the Submariner<\/a>, Daytona and GMT-Master are endlessly imitated, Rolex is not seen as a trendsetter, preferring to ignore passing horological fashions. It does its own thing, iterating carefully and minimally on its age-old templates.<\/p>\n

Five years ago, however, Rolex introduced a collection so avant-garde that is still influencing creative decisions across the entire watch industry, and it did so in one of its least-heralded models: the Oyster Perpetual<\/a>. The idea was so simple that we\u2019ve barely noticed it become the industry norm: Instead of slowly rolling out new dial colours one at a time over a period of years\u2014which was standard watch world behavior until that point\u2014Rolex launched a whole set of colored dials in a complementary palette all at once.<\/p>\n

The 2020 multi-color Oyster Perpetual collection that started the wave of watch-world bright dials.<\/p>\n

COURTESY OF ROLEX<\/p>\n

They were bright, bold and almost childlike in their purity: coral red, green, turquoise, pink and yellow. Rolex-watchers immediately hailed them as a tribute to the so-called Stella dial Day-Date watches<\/a> of the late 1970s and 1980s\u2014equally bright and unexpected, and evocative of a louche, sybaritic age. But there was something more basic, more essential and, at least theoretically, more attainable about the Oyster Perpetual collection.<\/p>\n

It sparked imitators left, right and center\u2014and still does. At last week’s Geneva Watch Days 2025, Zenith\u2019s collaboration with Swiss furniture-maker USM would qualify as a textbook example<\/a>: a full set of bold, block-colour dials in otherwise traditional stainless steel sports watches.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, Oris\u2019s Big Crown Pointer Date<\/a> hit a similar note. In 2023, arch-rival Omega debuted a collection of Seamaster Aqua Terra<\/a> models with similar hues to Rolex’s opening salvo; other mid-level brands including Breitling and TAG Heuer have all created multi-colored families of stainless steel, time-only round watches in a similar mold<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the company that either invented or popularized the dive watch, the GMT watch, the first water-resistant watch,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":142240,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[49,48,1187,1189,76317,61,37766],"class_list":{"0":"post-142239","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-fashion","11":"tag-luxury","12":"tag-tag-heuer","13":"tag-technology","14":"tag-watches"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142239\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/142240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}