The new Perpetual Padellone looks back to one of the most fascinating Rolex watches ever made. But after spending some time with the story behind it, I’m far more interested in what it might be telling us about Rolex’s future.
There are Rolex watches you understand almost immediately. A Submariner is a Submariner. A GMT-Master tells you what it was built to do before you know anything about the movement inside it. Even the Daytona, despite everything that has grown around the name, remains fundamentally easy to understand. That clarity has always been part of what I admire about Rolex: the company rarely seems interested in making something complicated simply to prove that it can.
Then today I saw the new Perpetual Padellone, and my reaction was different. I didn’t immediately start looking for the movement specifications, the price or how impossible it might eventually become to buy one. I simply looked at it for a while because, strangely enough, it didn’t quite feel like the Rolex I have become accustomed to seeing.
There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about it. The calendar running around the perimeter of the dial, the moonphase at six, the classical proportions and even the slightly whimsical face of the moon give the Padellone a personality we don’t often associate with modern Rolex. It feels almost like a watch from an alternative version of the company, one in which the Submariner, GMT-Master and Daytona never became cultural phenomena and Rolex simply continued making elegant calendar watches for people who still cared about knowing what phase the moon was in.
That first impression was enough to make me curious. Then I started reading about where the Padellone came from, and the watch became considerably more interesting.
THE ROLEX BEFORE THE ROLEX WE KNOW
The name Padellone itself is part of the charm because Rolex didn’t invent it. Italian collectors gave the nickname, which roughly translates to “large frying pan,” to the legendary reference 8171, produced around the turn of the 1950s. At approximately 38mm, it was a large watch for its era, but what made it particularly unusual was its combination of a complete calendar and moonphase — complications that feel almost foreign when viewed through the lens of the Rolex we know today.
Rolex has now done something I find rather charming: instead of sanitizing that history with a new corporate name, it has taken the nickname created by collectors and made Padellone official.
The relationship between the old 8171 and the new watch is immediately recognizable, but thankfully Rolex hasn’t simply recreated a vintage watch and pretended the last seventy-five years never happened. The original used a complete calendar that required manual correction as shorter months passed. The new Padellone uses an annual calendar, automatically distinguishing between months containing 30 and 31 days and requiring its owner to intervene only once a year, when February turns into March.
That is where the nostalgic part of the story ends, because underneath that very traditional-looking dial sits a thoroughly modern Rolex.
THE OLD WATCH ENDS AT THE DIAL
Inside the Padellone is the new calibre 7190, and this was the point where I stopped seeing the watch simply as an attractive reinterpretation of an obscure vintage Rolex. The movement incorporates a newly developed annual-calendar architecture Rolex calls Haplos, designed not only to distinguish between 30- and 31-day months but also to execute one particularly satisfying piece of mechanical theatre.
At midnight, the day, date and month indications change together, almost instantaneously. That sounds simple until you think about what is actually happening mechanically. The movement has to accumulate enough energy to move several calendar indications at essentially the same moment, release that energy precisely and do so without significantly disturbing the regulating organ responsible for keeping the watch accurate. It is one of those mechanisms where the result looks far simpler than the engineering required to produce it.
The calibre runs at 5 Hz, uses Rolex’s Dynapulse escapement and Syloxi silicon hairspring, and provides approximately 66 hours of power reserve. Rolex says the movement is associated with 30 patent applications, including two relating specifically to the Padellone. Those are serious numbers, but what I like most is that almost none of this technical ambition is screaming at you from the front of the watch.
The Padellone doesn’t look like an engineering demonstration. If anything, it looks gentle. Rolex has spent decades perfecting watches whose character comes from robustness, precision and purpose, yet here all of that engineering has been hidden behind something far more romantic.
And then there is the moon.
SOMETIMES USELESS IS BEAUTIFUL
The moonphase may be my favorite part of the entire watch. Rolex uses a blue Grand Feu enamel disc, while the moons themselves are fashioned from meteorite and given human faces that recall the personality of the historical reference. It is an unusually playful detail from a company that normally exercises extraordinary discipline over almost every aspect of its design.
There is absolutely no practical reason for any of this, and I mean that as a compliment. My phone can tell me the phase of the moon more accurately than I will ever need to know it, along with the date, day, month, time zone, weather and just about anything else I could ask from a watch. Mechanical watchmaking stopped needing to justify itself purely through utility a long time ago. Sometimes watching a tiny meteorite moon travel across an enamel sky is justification enough.
That is partly why the Padellone feels unusual for Rolex. The company’s most famous complications have generally had an obvious purpose. The GMT-Master helped travelers track another time zone. The Daytona measured elapsed time. The Sky-Dweller combined an annual calendar with a second time zone in a remarkably practical package. Rolex certainly knows how to build sophisticated mechanisms, but it normally gives them a job.
The Padellone feels different. Its annual calendar is useful, certainly, but the emotional center of this watch isn’t utility. It is the pleasure of mechanical watchmaking itself, and I’m not sure we have seen Rolex embrace that idea quite this openly in a very long time.
MAYBE THE 1908 WAS TRYING TO TELL US SOMETHING
The Padellone also made me reconsider the Perpetual 1908. When Rolex introduced it in 2023, I initially saw the watch as the company establishing a proper classical dress-watch family again: elegant, restrained and technically interesting, but still somewhat removed from the sports watches that dominate our perception of the brand.
Now I’m beginning to wonder whether the Perpetual collection was always intended to become something broader.
The 1908 established a classical design language and gave Rolex a place outside the familiar boundaries of the Oyster Professional watches. More recently, the Land-Dweller introduced the Dynapulse escapement and a new generation of high-frequency movement architecture. Now the Padellone takes some of that modern technical thinking and places it inside one of the most traditional complications Rolex could have chosen.
One watch obviously isn’t enough to declare a new direction for the company, and Rolex hasn’t said that it intends to transform itself into a complication-driven manufacture. But the pieces are becoming interesting enough that I’m paying attention. What initially looked like a collection for classical Rolex watches may eventually prove to be the place where the company gives itself permission to explore ideas that simply wouldn’t belong inside a Submariner, Daytona or GMT-Master.
If that is what Rolex is building, the Padellone becomes considerably more important than another heritage-inspired release.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF ROLEX
The watch itself measures 39mm, almost exactly the proportion I would have hoped Rolex would choose for something like this, and is initially offered in Everose gold and platinum, including an Everose version on the elegant Settimo bracelet. Yet after spending time reading about the watch, those specifications became almost secondary to me.
What stayed with me was the contradiction at the center of it. One of the most disciplined and industrially sophisticated watch manufacturers in the world has made a moonphase with a smiling meteorite moon. A company synonymous with rugged sports watches has reached back to an obscure calendar reference from the 1950s. And underneath all that nostalgia sits a 5 Hz movement incorporating some of the newest technology Rolex has developed.
It is old Rolex and new Rolex occupying the same watch, and somehow neither seems to overwhelm the other. Perhaps that is what I like most about the Padellone.
RAW TIME VERDICT
I don’t think we need to call the Perpetual Padellone revolutionary. The watch industry uses that word far too easily, and one complicated Rolex doesn’t suddenly redefine the company. What it does, at least for me, is make Rolex feel a little less predictable.
For much of the modern era, Rolex has perfected a very particular form of watchmaking: extraordinarily robust, precise and recognizable watches built around complications that usually have a practical reason to exist. The Padellone feels like Rolex allowing itself to be something slightly different. It feels like the company allowing itself to be romantic, without abandoning the engineering discipline that made Rolex what it is.
Maybe this is simply a beautiful excursion into the archives. Maybe the Perpetual collection will remain a small corner of the Rolex universe. Or perhaps we are watching the beginning of a space where Rolex can experiment with traditional complications, decorative crafts and mechanical ideas that have very little to do with diving deeper, traveling farther or timing another lap.
I don’t know yet, and I actually like not knowing.
What I do know is that I started looking at the Padellone because it didn’t quite look like the Rolex I expected. I ended up interested in it because it made me wonder what Rolex might make next.
For a company whose greatest strength has always been consistency, making us curious again may be the most interesting thing about the Padellone.
— Mauricio Venegas
Founder & Editor, RAW TIME