Who Watches the Watchmen (Our Chit Chat Thread)

Rolex are extremely conservative with their design and brand, mainly because their market and buyers are and anything that deviates too far from the norm of "it looks like a Rolex" tends not to sell too well. A slight colour shift, a slightly different material or more/less text on the dial is about your lot and gets their market's attention and sales. This has stood Rolex very well over the years, so they'd be kinda mad to change that. Now they did bring out a lefty crown on the wrong side, but it still passed the "it looks like a Rolex"(and isn't a great seller), so I'd not expect anything too wacky or different from them.

I'm more the pure utility or Modernist designs from the times before the Future(tm) stopped being a thing and Modernism became a dirty word. The Rolex Sub is certainly a design classic, like the Fender Stratocaster, though the latter was extremely Modernist when it first came out in the 1950's(and took a while to gain traction). The Sub was more of an evolution of their Explorer*. Of the original first diving watches(with a bezel) for me anyway the Blancpain Fifty Fathoms was the most Modernist and most innovative. Omega, Longines and Rolex's offerings were more like playing catchup**. Pity their later offerings look a tad too "bling", but meh bling.

*IMHO the Explorer(along with the datejust) is the Rolex, the OG, genesis. All their other sports models are essentially the Explorer with add ons, and that's how they evolved too. Sub, Explorer with bezel(and the Sub was a rebranded Turn-o-Graph, itself an Explorer with a bezel), GMT, Explorer with bezel and extra hand, the modern Milgauss, Explorer with "funky" hands and class, AirKing, Explorer with different text on the dial. The Daytona is about the only outlier and that's more to do with function and movement.

** what's mad is Longines invented the external rotating bezel but for pilots and never thought of applying it to dive watches. Rolex had the Turn-O-Graph and their waterproof Oyster case, a Sub by any other name and again never thought of making that extra leap. They very rarely even mentioned swimming with thier watches in their adverts(even the first ad campaign for the Oyster featuring the woman who swam the English Channel, she wore it around her neck, not on her wrist). I suppose it was timing too. While military scuba diving was certainly a thing from WW2(and both Longines and Rolex provided watches/movements for that), civillian sport diving had only really started to take off, just as Blancpain brought out their Fifty Fathoms.