Rolex converts the try of the big frying pan, more than 70 years on

On 15 September 2026, Rolex presented the Perpetual Padellone. In a 39-millimetre case in Everose gold or platinum, it brings together an instantaneous full annual calendar and a moon phase, driven by a new movement, the calibre 7190, reserved for this model alone. Three years after the 1908, the brand moves a little further into a register where it is generally less expected, the dress watch with a complication. It succeeds there, and it succeeds while staying faithful to what it is.

The time of small steps

Rolex was not always the house of the tool watch. Between 1949 and 1952 it produced the reference 8171, a full calendar with moon phase that collectors nicknamed Padellone, the big frying pan, and of which Sotheby’s was still presenting an example in 2019. The 1950s changed things: with the Submariner and the Explorer, the tool watch became the image of the brand.

The dress watch never left the catalogue, though. At the end of the 1960s Rolex gathered its town models under the name Cellini, after the Florentine Renaissance goldsmith: gold cases, outside the Oyster family, made for the suit rather than the expedition. For more than half a century that discreet line maintained at Rolex a craft and a clientele the tool watches did not cover, and it served as a test bench for the house codes of classicism. The 2014 redesign installed the two-level bezel, fluted at the base and domed at the top, that the Padellone carries today. In 2017 the Cellini Moonphase brought the moon phase back to Rolex, on a blue enamelled disc where the moon is in meteorite, a principle the Padellone takes up. In 2023 the Cellini left the catalogue as the 1908 opened the Perpetual collection, which took over from it.

The Padellone takes the next step. The Sky-Dweller had introduced the annual calendar at Rolex in 2012, but in a travel watch; the Padellone installs it in the dress range itself. The progression is slow, almost cautious, and it looks like the house: Rolex ventures onto ground only once its industrial tooling is ready to hold it.

The choice of name points the same way. Rolex officially takes up a nickname coined by its collectors, and openly credits them with it. For a brand that weighs every word, the gesture counts, and it goes far beyond a wink: it asserts a bond with them and makes them the watch’s first audience.

The 7190, a calibre apart

The Padellone’s place in the hierarchy of mechanical calendars is precise.

A short aside on the complications serving calendar use: a simple or full calendar shows the date, sometimes the day and the month, but ignores the length of months and calls for five corrections a year. The annual calendar distinguishes thirty- and thirty-one-day months and asks for only one intervention, at the end of February. The perpetual calendar also takes in February and leap years, and calls for no correction before 2100. Despite the name of its collection, Perpetual designating at Rolex the house rotor, the Padellone belongs to the second category: it is a full annual calendar. It can be read as a deliberate choice, that of the point where the complication gives the most service for the least mechanics.

The 7190 was, of course, entirely developed and built by Rolex. It derives from the 7135 presented in 2025 with the Land-Dweller, whose regulating system it takes up: silicon Dynapulse escapement, Syloxi hairspring, ceramic balance staff. The hairspring received thickened coils to hold the 5 hertz frequency, the power reserve reaches around 66 hours, and the calibre remains thinner than most of the brand’s movements. Thirty patent filings protect it, two of them its own.

The annual calendar rests on Haplos, a new system that has been the subject of a patent filing. It adds only two components to the instantaneous date mechanism, a driving finger and an annual lever, and the programming of thirty- and thirty-one-day months is built into the back of the month disc, which informs the lever of the current month. The simultaneous, instantaneous jump of date, day and month at midnight is covered by a further patent application.

It is in that restraint that the Padellone is recognisable as a Rolex. The brand’s reputation for reliability rests in large part on a form of holding back: movements that do not stack up difficulties, and are the easier to service over time for it. The Padellone transposes that discipline to a classic complication. Only the years will say whether the 7190 ages as well as its elders, but the brand has set the bar. Since 2026 its Superlative Chronometer certification has been enlarged by three criteria, resistance to magnetism, reliability and durability.

Sport in evening dress

Can a house shaped by the sports watch reach the refinement this register demands? Rolex itself places the Padellone at the frontier between a tribute to classical watchmaking and the pursuit of performance, and it is on that line that the watch must be judged.

The dial holds the classical promise. Its grained centre contrasts with a satin-brushed outer ring where the dates are printed in black, crossed by a blue date hand ending in a crescent moon. The day and month windows at 12 o’clock answer the blue enamelled moon disc at 6 o’clock, whose full moon and new moon are made in meteorite and each carry a face. The numerals 3 and 9 and the faceted markers are in gold, pink on the intense white dial of the Everose version, grey on the ice blue of the platinum. The whole is dense with information and yet perfectly ordered, which is the real test of a full calendar.

The case continues in the same register. At 39 millimetres for 12.2 in thickness, it stays within the proportions of a dress watch, with lugs whose curve is underlined by lightly chamfered edges. The sapphire back reveals an openworked yellow gold rotor and bridges decorated with Côtes de Genève in Rolex’s own interpretation, where a fine polished groove separates each stripe. The Everose version can take the Settimo bracelet, its links made of seven small polished and slightly domed elements, closed by a concealed Crownclasp; the other versions receive a matt alligator strap with green lining.

The house DNA stays legible everywhere, though. The two-level bezel inherited from the Cellini signs Rolex at first glance. The 8171 closed with a snap-on back, where the Padellone receives a screwed back and water resistance guaranteed to 50 metres. Its oscillator rests on Paraflex shock absorbers. Rolex has built an evening watch with the reflexes of an everyday one.

Haute horlogerie, really?

Does the Padellone bring Rolex into haute horlogerie?

Rolex does not hide the ambition: it presents its Perpetual collection as a celebration of the noblest watchmaking art. On paper the answer has existed since 2016 in any case. Although the Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie, publishing its grid of criteria, placed Rolex among the historic houses of the field, the classification weighs less than the image in connoisseurs’ minds. Haute horlogerie is associated with the houses of complications, and Rolex with the Submariner.

The Padellone unsettles that division. The full annual calendar with moon phase belongs to the classical repertoire of haute horlogerie, and Rolex approaches it with a dedicated calibre and solutions protected by patent filings. The watch therefore belongs to haute horlogerie by its complication, without occupying its summit. On calendar ground, the perpetual calendar remains a notch above in technicality, and secular calendars higher still. Rolex comes back to it by the most rational step. It will take time for enthusiasts’ reflexes to follow, but the way is open, and handsomely so.

What this reveals

This launch is not aimed at volume. According to estimates by Morgan Stanley and LuxeConsult, Rolex sold around 1.15 million watches in 2025, 2 per cent fewer than in 2024, a year that already marked a fall, while its average price rose 6 per cent to close to 14,000 Swiss francs. It would be, according to the analysts, the first decline over two consecutive years in more than twenty years, and they forecast stable volumes in 2026. The brand’s growth now runs through value, and a complication in gold or platinum is its direct expression.

The underlying movement is slower, and more significant. Again according to these estimates, Rolex accounts for close to a third of Swiss watch sales by value, against around 7 per cent for Patek Philippe. The sector’s leading player is growing in small steps on a segment that is not its natural ground, the very one on which the prestige of the houses of complications is founded. The Perpetual collection is no longer any kind of sideline. Rolex has announced nothing about what comes next, but the border between the best-selling brand and the specialists of grand complications is becoming porous.

One unknown remains, and it lies in what makes the Padellone strong. Climbing the next steps, those of the perpetual calendar or other grand complications, would mean accepting a mechanical density Rolex has so far kept at arm’s length. The whole question is how far the house can climb in complexity without giving up the restraint that makes this watch a success today.

Sources: Rolex, Newsroom, Perpetual Padellone, September 2026
Rolex, page on the Sky-Dweller’s Saros calendar (rolex.com)
Fondation de la Haute Horlogerie, White Paper on haute horlogerie, 2016, and Rolex entry (hautehorlogerie.org)
Morgan Stanley and LuxeConsult, Swiss Watcher report, February 2026
Sotheby’s, Important Watches sale, 2019, lot 128, reference 8171.