If Switzerland was a high school cafeteria, Rolex would be the king of the cool kids’ table. The Crown still sets the tone for the watch industry at large. Case in point: the rainbow-hued gemstones you see on timepieces from virtually every brand these days? That trend all began with one brand. “There’s absolutely no denying that the modern rainbow-watch lineage begins with Rolex,” Malaika Crawford reported for Hodinkee nearly two years ago.
Most point to the release of the “Rainbow” Daytona in 2012 as the starting point for this trend, but Rolex’s experimentation with multi-hued gems actually goes back much further. The proof? Today, Phillips auction house announced that it is bringing the first-ever Rainbow Daytona, made a full two decades before the 2012 release, to auction as part of its Geneva sale in November. There is no high estimate, just a towering baseline of $3.5 million.
This watch is the original “Rainbow” Daytona—a model that is now one of Rolex’s cornerstones. The Crown produced this particular watch as a piece unique for a client in the Middle East in 1993 or 1994, according to Phillips. You can understand, then, why the auction house has set the estimate so high for this piece. This isn’t merely a gem-set Rolex; it’s the exact model that started the rainbow trend that is now so prevalent in the watch industry. Standard production Rolex Daytonas are pricey and hard to come by as it is. Now add in the fact this is a piece unique that set the foundation for all those that would come after it and you have a watch worth many millions.
Until today, the watch was the stuff of legend. Crawford’s Hodinkee story mentioned a piece unique fitting this description that Eric Ku, founder of online auction house Loupe This, once sold to a private collection. It’s the type of piece that could have stayed locked away forever. However, Ku confirmed to me that this is the exact piece he sold long ago.
Phillips is organizing this sale around watches that showcase “the 1980s and 1990s [as] a period of intense change and experimentation,” the auction house said in a press release. Few watches exemplify the shots the industry was taking during that era quite like this Rainbow Daytona. Rolex was, and still is, known for its rugged sport watches. Upon its initial release, the Rainbow seemed to go against the brand’s very DNA—and many collectors fumed in the beginning. Now, the watch is not just one of the Crown’s signatures but a piece that defines the era of luxury-sport watches that we are still in. And what could be more luxurious than the first Rainbow Daytona ever made?
