Rolex Teases a New Watch 100 Years in the Making

On Tuesday, April 14, most of the major players in the luxury watch industry will unveil their latest creations in Geneva at Watches and Wonders, the world’s largest and most influential watch show.

Many significant brands are participating, including Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet and Cartier, but none more significant than Rolex. The Geneva giant is the largest watch brand in the world and is estimated to account for a third of the entire Swiss watch industry on its own. For the past several years, Rolex has dominated the conversation at Watches and Wonders by debuting nearly all of its annual releases at the show.

Traditionally, on the Friday before the show, Rolex shares a video on its social media accounts teasing its new releases. Today, the brand released the video for this year. And while we only get a glimpse of one new watch, we have a pretty clear idea of the theme behind this year’s new Rolex watches.

Watches and Wonders Geneva: Rolex, Grand Seiko and dozens of other heavy hitters gather in Switzerland every year to release their biggest watches. Catch up on all the new novelties.

Oyster Story

In previous years’ teasers, Rolex has shown quick flashes of unreleased watches that made journalists like me put on our detective hats to try and figure out what we were looking at. This year, the brand went in a different direction, with a teaser that shows more of Rolex’s past than its future

2026 is the 100th anniversary of the Oyster case. Rolex has a lot of accomplishments to its name, but arguably its greatest was creating the world’s first mass-market waterproof wristwatch in 1926 with the Oyster. The new teaser is all about celebrating that milestone and reveals the theme for 2026 as “Oyster Story.” You can watch it in full below.

OK, so here’s a little breakdown of what you just saw. The video starts off with an exploded hexagonal gold Oyster case that looks like a 1920s Oyster. We also see this same vintage-looking watch in full on a leather strap as the thumbnail for the video.

Next, we get a close-up of a dial in that same vintage Oyster. It has a guilloché dial, printed Roman numeral indices, a railroad minute track and blued Breguet hands. Rolex hasn’t made anything that looks like this in many decades, and Rolex doesn’t really do the whole “vintage remake” thing that almost every other watch brand does.

But if they are going to do it, a 100th anniversary seems like a pretty good place to start. Still, if this were a remake, I don’t think Rolex would fully reveal it as they have here. I’m pretty sure this is a vintage watch.

Rolex

Moving on, we see brief historical clips of significant twentieth-cnetury accomplishments: Mercedes Gleitze, the first woman to swim the English Channel; the first expedition to fly over Mount Everest; Sir Malcolm Campbell breaking the land speed record; Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay becoming the first summiteers of Everest and the Trieste setting the record for the world’s deepest dive in the Mariana Trench.

What do these world record breakers all have in common? They all had Rolex Oyster watches accompanying their journeys.

The next part of the video looks more toward the future. We see a rocket blasting off, several shots inside Rolex workshops, then an extremely fast series of Rolex watches. Don’t worry, I went frame by frame, and there are no new models snuck in there. It’s a mix of existing Oyster-cased models: the Datejust, Day-Date, Daytona, Land-Dweller, Sky-Dweller and Oyster Perpetual.

Speaking of the Oyster Perpetual, this is where we get our sole glimpse at a new watch. The video shows a close-up of the dial of an unreleased OP, recognizable for its double-baton index at 6:00. The watch says “100 Years” below the index where “Swiss Made” would normally appear, suggesting this will be a commemorative watch, something Rolex rarely does.

Rolex

We can also see that the dial is gray with a sunburst pattern, possibly a “Rhodium” dial, and that the indices and seconds hand are yellow gold. More interesting is the bezel. It’s in smooth yellow gold, and below that, we can see an end link in brushed gray metal.

I assume the bracelet and the rest of the case are steel, but the material appears so dark gray in the video that I’m almost convinced it’s RLX titanium. A two-tone Oyster Perpetual in Rolesor would be pretty big news in itself, but if Rolex were to mix titanium and gold on the watch, it might just break the internet.

Obviously, Rolex is going to release more than one two-tone Oyster Perpetual at Watches and Wonders, but it does seem like the brand is eager to celebrate the Oyster case. Given the accomplishments highlighted in the video have to do with swimming, aviation, motorsports, mountaineering and diving, perhaps that means we’re also going to see new versions of the Submariner, GMT-Master II, Daytona, Explorer and Sea-Dweller?

We’ll find out for sure next week in Geneva, where the Gear Patrol team and I will be on the ground at Watches and Wonders reporting on all of the new Rolex releases.

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