Rolex does not launch watches outside of Watches and Wonders often. The Daytona Le Mans, the Deepsea Challenge in titanium, the D-Blue dial. Each was an event. On 15 September, in Milan, the Crown added another to that short list: the Perpetual Padellone, a 39mm annual calendar with moonphase that reaches all the way back to a reference most collectors have only ever seen in auction catalogues.
The Frying Pan Returns
The original Padellone, Reference 8171, was made for roughly four years beginning in 1949. It was a 38mm triple calendar moonphase with a snap caseback, produced in somewhere between 1,000 and 1,200 pieces. Italian collectors called it the padellone, their word for a large frying pan, because the case was unusually wide and flat for its era. Rolex has now adopted that nickname as the official model name, a rare instance of the brand embracing collector lore rather than obscuring it.
The vintage 8171 has become one of the most sought-after Rolexes in existence. Recent auction results range from roughly $90,000 to well over $600,000 depending on condition and metal. The new watch is not a reissue but a clear descendant: it preserves the dial layout with day and month apertures at 12 o'clock, a central date hand with crescent tip, and a moonphase at 6 o'clock, all reinterpreted through the Perpetual collection's modern grammar.
A Dial That Earns Its Complexity
The Padellone's grained white dial, available in intense white for Everose gold or ice blue for platinum, carries a lot of information without feeling cluttered. A fine satin track runs around the periphery for the date, with 31 printed in blue to avoid a visual clash with 1. The moonphase disc is blue enamel, its full and new moons cut from meteorite, one treated with a dark PVD coating, each bearing a small face drawn from the original 8171. Pad-printed silver stars scatter across the lacquered surface. The effect is restrained, almost quiet, until you look closely and realise how much is happening.
Calibre 7190 and the Haplos Calendar
Underneath sits the calibre 7190, a 5Hz automatic movement derived from the 7135 that debuted in the Land-Dweller last year. It carries the Dynapulse escapement, Rolex's silicon sequential-distribution system that gives the balance a direct impulse, paired with a Syloxi hairspring. The power reserve is approximately 66 hours. The calendar mechanism, called Haplos, is where the engineering genuinely surprises: Rolex has filed 30 patent applications for this movement, and the annual calendar adds just two components to a standard date mechanism. Day, date and month all jump instantaneously at midnight. The watch needs a single correction each year, at the end of February.
Three References, Three Characters
The Padellone arrives in three configurations. Two are 18k Everose gold with a grained white dial: one on a matt brown alligator strap at CHF 48,500, the other on Rolex's new seven-link Settimo bracelet with a concealed Crownclasp at CHF 60,700. The third is 950 platinum with an ice-blue dial on a black alligator strap, priced at CHF 55,000. All carry the updated 2026 Superlative Chronometer certification, now tested for magnetism resistance, reliability and sustainability alongside the existing criteria.
A sapphire caseback reveals the movement, another departure for a brand that has historically kept its workings hidden. The Padellone is not a sports watch and does not pretend to be one. It is 50 metres water resistant, 12.2mm thick and distinctly dressy. What makes it significant is that Rolex chose to build it at all. An annual calendar moonphase, a movement architecture still in its infancy, a sapphire caseback and a collector nickname made official. Two genuinely new references in two consecutive years, after the Land-Dweller, suggests the Crown's product cycle is accelerating. The Padellone goes on sale in November.