Last year, right after the entirely digital Watches and Wonders trade show I wrote a piece pondering all the shades of green that new watches were released in. This year, I packed my bags and hit the floor in Geneva, fully expecting another color trend to emerge. It would make sense; while 2021 was the year of green, 2020 was all about blue. And just before that salmon-colored dials were all the rage. But the “it” color of 2022 never appeared.
So what’s the predominant color this year? Maybe I missed it in all the hustle and bustle of being back in-person. It looks like there simply isn’t one. And that isn’t a bad thing. In terms of color, the 2022 watch product cycle was all about brands doing their own thing – from an entire movement serving as a winding rotor to the first use of lab-grown diamonds in horology. While I’m lukewarm Rolex Datejust 36 watcheson trends as a whole, it’s hard to deny that color is a big business. There are professionals who actually get paid to forecast color trends, and for a long time our industry has followed these trends. They aren’t consumer-driven, either. Miranda Priestly puts it best in the 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada when she concludes her commentary on a blue sweater with this remark:
Who knows where the colors on the dials of Watches & Wonders 2022 releases came from. All I know is that the Rolex Datejust 36 watches below use color in a way that’s both novel and exciting. Finally, we’re living in a post-uniform-color-trend world.
You’ve seen it already, I know. Rolex made a “destro” Rolex GMT-Master II that features a black-and-green bezel. So what gives? Well, as I said in the Hands-On report, the clues were in the Submariner line in terms of how Rolex expands color in their models. Green was the next logical introduction, and it’s finally here. It’s a neat way to incorporate traditional Rolex colors into a model we all know and love. It’s the same green that appears on the Submariner, so it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that it found its way into the GMT, and regardless of what folks think about it, there will still be lines around the corner to get it.