/fa/ - Fashion

I really wish everyone would stop lumping all Rolexes in together. I'm in full beat-the-overpaid-plebs-with-their-own-90mm-watches agreement on Rolex's current lineup. But vintage Rolex?

They were high end techwear just two eras ago, perfect incarnations of, and now monuments to, the human impulse to do things intensely and well, which includes doing them with beauty. They were tools for doing things like climbing Everest, navigating a plane over long distances, or doing scientific research in the roughest conditions. They were meant to be used and beat up, which they frequently were: the best examples have what's called a "tropical dial:" a black dial that's been aged by equatorial sun to a rich, dappled brown.

The best models, to my taste, are the first and second versions of the Explorer, and the GMT Master. Ideally with a Pepsi bezel (pic related). None of them are perfect, although the Explorer I perhaps comes closest, so pared down and direct, lacking only in that 24 hour dials are so obviously superior. The Explorer II is imperfect in lacking a Pepsi dial option and in having a date function, and the GMT Master just has the date function.

(But thinking about it now, maybe it's just a matter of different times, and the GMT Master (again, black dial, Pepsi bezel, as pictured gone tropical) might actually be perfect. What's bothered me about them is the extra fuss implied in having to reset the calendar every month, for little benefit. But a mechanical is fussy no matter what, and when your only link to the broader, quotidian world is a shortwave radio, a calendar on your wrist could be an essential comfort.)