When it comes to Rolex, words are chosen carefully. Nothing is simply “new”: it is “reinterpreted.” Nothing is merely “colourful”: it’s “heritage.” Even “playful” is absorbed, usually, into the language of the brand’s own aesthetic codes. For Geneva’s most controlled household name, design is never just design.

The new multicoloured Jubilee-motif dial of the Oyster Perpetual 36 arrives precisely within that vocabulary. According to Rolex, the dial is a contemporary take on the Jubilee motif introduced in the late 1970s. Across its surface, the letters of ROLEX are repeated in ten different colours, forming a graphic, coded, and highly colourful composition.

What makes this wording particularly interesting is that Rolex is not usually vague when it comes to its own history. This is a brand that knows how to date its milestones, name its innovations and underline its archive with almost surgical precision. When Rolex wants to claim a technical or aesthetic first, it does so clearly. It never allows for much mist around its own mythology. So, when a dial this visually specific is described through the broader language of a “Jubilee motif” from the late 1970s, the softness of the claim becomes part of the story. Not because it proves anything, but because Rolex’s usual confidence makes this particular ambiguity feel unusually audible.

Technically, of course, it is not a simple dial to produce: each colour has to be applied with precision, each letter has to sit exactly where it should, and the whole surface must retain that unmistakable Rolex smoothness. But Rolex’s technical competence is not really the question here. With Rolex, craftsmanship, reliability, finishing, quality control, movement architecture, bracelet construction and case proportions are already operating at the highest level. To ask whether a modern Rolex is well made is a little like standing in the National Gallery and asking whether the frame is sturdy. Of course it is. The more interesting question is what this technical confidence allows the object to say. And what this dial says is not limited to watchmaking.

Watch culture still speaks largely to a defined circle: collectors, clients, specialists, obsessives, insiders. Art, on the other hand, is everywhere; fine artists have explored symbols, repetition, colour, language, order, disorder and the politics of making long before any of those ideas were polished, miniaturised and placed beneath sapphire crystal. So, when a Rolex dial appears to brush against art history, the question is not only whether one thing resembles another. The more interesting question is what happens when a younger, more closed discipline comes into contact with a much older, and more expansive, visual memory.

In this case – or rather, this dial – it is difficult to look at the new Oyster Perpetual without thinking of artist Alighiero Boetti.

Boetti’s world of letters, grids, colours, systems and embroidered language predates the moment Rolex now identifies as the origin of its Jubilee motif. His alphabetic and gridded compositions were already taking shape in the early 1970s; his small embroidered works began around 1972; works such as Ordine e Disordine appeared in 1973. Rolex, meanwhile, places its Jubilee motif at the end of that decade. There is no legal conclusion to draw here, nor is this a courtroom exercise. But visually and historically, there is a small chronological discomfort – and that discomfort is precisely what makes the dial interesting.

Boetti was never simply making “colourful squares.” His practice carried within it a way of thinking: the visibility of labour, the poetry of repetition, the instability of systems, the beauty of order interrupted by chance. Emerging from the atmosphere of Arte Povera but not confined to it, Boetti helped develop a visual language in which the humble, the handmade and the conceptual could coexist. Arte Povera itself was never only about poor materials; its influence extended into conceptual art, post-minimalism, design culture and the broader relationship between object, process and meaning.

Rolex’s new dial seems, intentionally or not, to echo some of that visual language onto one of luxury watchmaking’s most immaculate surfaces. And perhaps that is why it works. In high watchmaking, influence is not always a weakness. Often, it is the thing that gives an object greater value. When a motif opens a door into art history, the watch stops being only a technical object. It becomes a cultural footnote.

The irony, of course, is that Rolex does not make this connection explicit. For the brand, this is a Jubilee motif. But collectors do not only read official copy. They read surfaces, colours, rumours, resemblances. They see not only the repeated Rolex letters, but also the possibility of Boetti’s chromatic language shimmering underneath them.

After all, no one expects an actual soft drink in a “Pepsi”, a comic-book vigilante in a “Batman”, or a zoological argument in a “Panda.” Watch nicknames are not born from academic precision. They are born from recognition: a shortcut, a visual click, a shared wink between collectors.

The Celebration dial, released three years ago at that year’s Watches and Wonders, was the first to open this door. Suddenly the Oyster Perpetual looked more cheerful, more pop, less distant. Its coloured bubbles brought together the bright lacquer dial colours first introduced in 2020, creating what felt like a confetti explosion on the usually composed face of Rolex. It was a rare smile from a very serious brand.

The new Jubilee dial feels like the more cultured cousin of that same impulse. If the Celebration dial was confetti, this is an alphabet game. The former arrived at the party with a bottle of fizz; the latter brought an exhibition catalogue for a gift.

Such unorthodox gestures have become more visible under the Rolex umbrella over the past few years. A transparent sapphire caseback was once the sort of thing many assumed Rolex would simply never do, especially on watches connected to the brand’s professional mythology. Then came models that questioned even that assumption. On the Daytona Le Mans, the tiny red “100” on the tachymeter bezel was a microscopic gesture by ordinary standards, but in Rolex terms it was practically a manifesto. Then came the Celebration dial. Now, this multicoloured Jubilee.

Rolex remains Rolex, but every now and then, it loosens its tie. The remarkable thing is that even the loosened tie becomes collectible.

Which brings us to 2029. If Rolex continues this three-year rhythm of chromatic disruption – 2023 Celebration, 2026 Jubilee – then one cannot help wondering what the third colourful edition might look like. Perhaps a “Mappa Dial,” bringing together Rolex’s mythology of travel, exploration and world time through a cartographic colour language. Or a “Glyph Dial,” replacing letters with symbols, icons and coded signs drawn from Rolex’s own universe. Or, might I suggest the most Rolex possibility of all: while everyone expects something spectacular, the brand changes the colour of a single index and makes the watch almost impossible to obtain. (If Rolex could be said to have a sense of humour, it would probably be very dry and very Swiss).

So, should we call this watch the “Boetti Dial”? Rolex almost certainly will not. Rolex never calls things what we call them. The brand speaks in reference numbers, collectors speak in nicknames. That unofficial language is one of the great pleasures of watch culture. Rolex designs, the market names. Rolex says “Jubilee motif”; collectors ask, “Boetti?”

Perhaps that is enough. This watch is not Boetti, and it does not need to be. But it speaks, however indirectly, in a language Boetti had already made visible: letters as image, colour as structure, and order as something always on the verge of becoming play.

Rolex tells the time. Boetti had already embroidered it.