100 years later, the Rolex Oyster is still making waves

SHANGHAI – The evening of June 9, 2026 opened – as all memorable evenings should – with an aria.

Sonya Yoncheva, the acclaimed Bulgarian soprano and a Rolex Testimonee, stepped onto the stage at West Bund Dome Art Center in Shanghai and performed Hymne a l’amour, Edith Piaf’s enduring ode to love, before an audience of collectors, journalists and watch enthusiasts gathered from around the world.

Welcome to Oyster Story, Rolex’s landmark exhibition marking the 100th anniversary of the Oyster, the watch that laid the foundation for everything that followed.

Staged at West Bund Dome Art Center in Shanghai’s Xuhui District from June 10 to 28, the exhibition is open to the public free of charge, with advance reservations required.

The venue is an inspired setting for the exhibition. Set along the Huangpu riverfront, it occupies China’s first cement factory, a relic of Shanghai’s industrial past reimagined by Danish architectural firm Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects as a striking cultural space spanning nearly 9,000 sq m, and anchored by a vast 3,000 sq m central dome.

It is the kind of building where history and reinvention feel at home, and Rolex has filled it accordingly.

The exhibition unfolds across multiple floors, each charting a different chapter in the Oyster’s century-long story. On the ground floor, more than 100 Rolex timepieces trace the evolution of the collection, pairing rare archival pieces with current models.

The earliest watches – with octagonal cases and delicate wire lugs – look markedly different from today’s sleek Oyster designs, making the continuity of the case architecture across a century all the more remarkable. Several of the rarest pieces are on loan from private collectors.

The first floor shifts focus from watches to the people who wore them. A gallery of 100 portraits maps a century of notable Rolex wearers spanning film, sport, exploration and music. The late Hollywood actor Paul Newman features prominently, his exotic-dial Cosmograph Daytona famously sold through auction house Phillips in 2017 for more than US$17 million, then a world record for a wristwatch at auction.

Alongside him are, among others, tennis great Roger Federer, racing legend Jackie Stewart, filmmaker and deepsea explorer James Cameron as well actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Zendaya. Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke adds a local note to the line-up.

Then come the technical rooms. The Superlative Pavilion offers a detailed look at how a Rolex is made, breaking down movements, cases, dials and bracelets into their individual components with great clarity.

Among the highlights is the Cyclostock, a machine designed to continuously wind a movement to simulate years of wear and test durability. Nearby sits an even more precise instrument: a rubidium optical atomic clock developed by Rolex, accurate to within a second over a million years and now integrated into the international network used to define Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC.

A cinema room, meanwhile, screens the specially-commissioned film Oyster Story – From a Single Idea to a Century of Innovation, and a library lounge invites visitors to slow down and explore the world of Rolex at their own pace.

Back to 1926

To understand why the Oyster is still so sought after a century later, you have to return to 1926. That was the year Hans Wilsdorf, the German-born entrepreneur who founded Rolex in London in 1905 before relocating to Geneva, introduced the watch that would define the company’s future.

The Oyster was the world’s first truly waterproof and dustproof wristwatch, made possible by an elegantly simple engineering solution: a screw-down bezel, screw-down caseback, and winding crown fitted with a threaded locking sleeve. Soft gaskets sealed the case hermetically, protecting the movement from water and dust.

Today such construction feels familiar. In the 1920s, it was a breakthrough that fundamentally changed what a wristwatch could do.

Wilsdorf understood that innovation alone was never enough; it needed a compelling demonstration.

In October 1927, he found the perfect opportunity in Mercedes Gleitze, the young British swimmer who had just become the first British woman to conquer the English Channel – after completing the gruelling crossing from France to England in 15 hours and 15 minutes on her eighth attempt. Though the Channel spans 33.5 kms at its narrowest point, treacherous weather and shifting currents meant the actual distance she swam was considerably longer. 

Her triumph was almost immediately thrown into doubt when another swimmer claimed to have completed the route in a faster time, a sensational boast later exposed as a hoax.

Determined to defend both her reputation and record, Gleitze agreed to a widely publicised Vindication Swim on October 21, 1927. Seizing the moment, Wilsdorf entrusted her with what would later become known as the Companion Oyster, a prototype Rolex housed in a nine-karat gold octagonal case, setting the stage for one of the most consequential product demonstrations in watchmaking history.

Gleitze wore it around her neck for more than 10 hours in freezing water. She herself had to be rescued from exhaustion but the watch emerged unscathed, still running perfectly, with no trace of moisture inside.

Wilsdorf moved quickly. The following day, he took out a full-page advertisement in the Daily Mail, turning a technical achievement into a global marketing triumph, and laying the groundwork for the kind of sports sponsorship strategy luxury brands still rely on today.

Nearly a century later, the original Companion Oyster resurfaced at Sotheby’s Geneva, where it sold in Nov 2025 for around US$1.73 million to an Asian collector. Engraved on its caseback were the words that secured its place in watchmaking history: Miss M. Gleitze, The Companion Oyster, Vindication Channel Swim, October 21st, 1927.

Building the Legend

If 1927 proved the concept, the decades that followed established the blueprint.

In 1931, Rolex introduced the Perpetual rotor, the world’s first practical self-winding mechanism. Combined with the Oyster case, it gave birth to the Oyster Perpetual, a watch powered simply by the movement of its wearer’s wrist, eliminating the need for daily winding. One of those early examples now resides in London’s Science Museum as an important industrial artefact.

Innovation accelerated. In 1945 came the Rolex Datejust, the first self-winding chronometer with a date display integrated into the dial. Eight years later, Rolex introduced the Cyclops lens, magnifying the date 2.5 times and creating one of the brand’s most recognisable design signatures.

That same landmark year, 1953, saw the arrival of the Rolex Submariner, the first wristwatch waterproof to 100 metres, designed for divers but soon embraced far beyond the underwater world. Rolex watches also accompanied the British Everest expedition that year, cementing an association with mankind’s first ascent of the world’s highest peak, even if historians still debate exactly which watches made it to the summit.

The icons kept coming. The Rolex GMT-Master arrived in 1955, developed with Pan American World Airways to allow pilots to track two time zones simultaneously. The Rolex Daytona followed in 1963, purpose-built for motorsport. Then came the Rolex Sea-Dweller in 1967. Different watches, different purposes but all descendants of the same Oyster architecture first conceived by Wilsdorf decades earlier.

In 2018, Rolex reinforced that legacy by renaming its proprietary steel alloy Oystersteel, a nod to the design principle that started it all. Made from 904L stainless steel, a material prized for its exceptional corrosion resistance and rarely used elsewhere in watchmaking, it is produced entirely in Rolex’s own Geneva foundry.

Why it still matters

A century later, the formula remains remarkably intact. Rolex now reportedly produces an estimated 1.2 million watches annually, nearly all housed in Oyster cases, with the notable exception of the recently introduced Rolex 1908. 

But it has never relied on legacy alone. In 2026, the brand expanded its Superlative Chronometer certification, raising the benchmark from four performance criteria to seven.

Precision, waterproofness, self-winding and autonomy are now joined by resistance to magnetism, long-term reliability and sustainability, reflecting how the definition of performance has evolved alongside the modern wearer. Every watch leaving Geneva now carries the updated green seal.

Leading the anniversary year is the new Rolex Oyster Perpetual 41, unveiled at Watches and Wonders Geneva 2026 in April. The centenary edition features a slate sunray dial with the words 100 Years printed at six o’clock in place of the traditional Swiss Made, while the winding crown is engraved simply with the number 100, a quiet tribute to the watch that began the story a century ago.

The evening closed with a spectacle of light. Along the banks of the Huangpu River, swarms of drones and sweeping architectural projections transformed Shanghai’s skyline into a moving canvas.

Across the vast domed roof of the venue flashed scenes drawn from Rolex’s century-long story: Mercedes Gleitze emerging from the icy waters of the English Channel, mountaineer and explorer Edmund Hillary standing atop Everest, and a bathyscaphe, or a deep-sea submersible, descending into the darkness of the Mariana Trench.

The images unfolded in a sweeping tribute to a hundred years of exploration, endurance and innovation before culminating, finally, in a simple but unmistakable symbol: the Rolex crown and the number 100, glowing in gold against the Shanghai night sky.

Perhaps the appeal of the Rolex Oyster lies in what it has always stood for, the simple but powerful idea that a watch should first and foremost be built for life – dependable, functional and robust enough to be worn, not merely admired.

Info: The Rolex “Oyster Story” exhibition at Shanghai West Bund Dome Art Center, 2300 Longteng Avenue, Xuhui District, runs until June 28, 2026. Free admission; reservations required via the Rolex official WeChat mini-programme and oyster-story-shanghai.rolex.com/en