A hundred years of the Oyster, and 58 new references

Watches & Wonders Geneva ran from 14 to 20 April this year with 66 brands exhibiting, and Rolex used it to mark one hundred years of the Oyster case, patented in 1926. Fifty-eight new references followed — not a refresh of one line but a theme stretched deliberately across the whole collection.

Where the attention went

The Oyster Perpetual, appropriately, carried the centenary. The 36 arrived with a multicoloured Jubilee-motif dial built from ten lacquer colours, each applied individually by pad printing — a genuinely difficult piece of dial-making dressed up as something playful. Two-tone and full gold configurations returned to the line after years away.

Elsewhere: a Daytona with a grand feu enamel dial and an open caseback, a new gold alloy called Jubilee Gold on the Day-Date 40, and the return of the Yacht-Master II. The GMT-Master II lost the Pepsi entirely.

Reading fifty-eight references

A release this wide is not really about any single watch. It is Rolex saying that the Oyster case — screw-down crown, hermetically sealed middle case, the thing that made the brand — is the product, and everything else is a variation on it.

For anyone buying, the practical consequence is that a lot of outgoing configurations quietly left the catalogue at the same time. Those are the interesting ones. New references are available eventually; discontinued ones only get harder.

If you are trying to work out what your existing piece is now worth against all this, that is a conversation worth having sooner rather than later.