What was the biggest news of the day? The obvious answer is what happened over at the Rolex booth. For the first time in over a decade, the brand introduced an entirely new sport model—the Land-Dweller, which heavily borrows design cues from the purportedly Gèrald Genta-designed Rolex Oysterquartz, but features a reworked case and bracelet that houses totally new machinery inside. The movement is thinner, keeps more accurate time, and should need to be serviced less than the old Oysterquartz. It also features some new technology with really fun-to-say names, like Dynapulse, which sounds like a fad exercise machine from the ’80s that I need to blast my core.
This year, Rolex ticked every box on the industry bingo card in a way that’s both satisfying and kind of unsettling. The brand added trendy stone dials to the GMT-Master, revived a sporty Genta design, and put its watches on a major celebrity (Roger Federer) to promote the big new release. Typically Rolex zags hard when it comes to industry trends, so it feels a bit odd to see them playing along so nicely.
As for the rest of the collection, I really like the pastel-dial Oyster Perpetuals and the new gold bracelet the Crown made for the 1908.
Playing the hits
