Rolex is indisputably the biggest and most influential watchmaker in the world. Where it goes, the industry follows, which is why setting out to rank all of best Rolex watch models might seem foolish. Because the Crown really does make the most important and recognisable timepieces on the market.
.. so how do you choose a winner when the brand has had so many important hits over the course of its 119-year history? But when you start to get into the nitty-gritty of it, you realise that despite Rolex’s enduring stranglehold on watch collectors, the brand hasn’t actually released that many different lines over the decades.
Instead, the Crown is as streamlined as a supercar, famously sticking by and slowly iterating on its icons over the years in an attempt to inch them closer and closer to perfection. Think of the biggest releases over the past couple of years: a Daytona with slightly thinner rings around the subdials; a Submariner that’s a mere millimetre larger than the version it succeeds. Making this list also put a fine point on how Rolex builds up its most important lines.
“One of Rolex’s greatest assets is that everything they do and have done informs each other,” James Lamdin , the owner of New York-based vintage shop Analog:Shift, tells me. The waterproof technology of the Oyster Perpetual goes into the Submariner, which is then the basis for the deeper-diving Sea Dweller , which eventually yields the Yacht-Master, a dive watch for getting some sun on deck. E.
