Watches & Wonders 2024: Rolex Dresses Up Perpetual 1908 in Platinum and Ice Blue

Watches and Wonders, the world’s biggest exhibition of new timepieces, kicks off today at the Palexpo in Geneva. We are on site at the show to cover the most exciting and significant new releases from some of your favorite brands. In this article we give a preview of Rolex’s newest elegant dress watch, the Perpetual 1908. 

The Background: It was in the year 1908 that Hans Wilsdorf renamed Wilsdorf & Davis, the watchmaking firm he’d founded with his partner, as Rolex Watch Company Ltd., a name that came to the founder on a carriage ride through London. In that same year, the formerly London-based company was registered in Geneva, Switzerland, where it has been based ever since. That milestone date provides the inspiration and the name for the elegant new family of dress watches unveiled just last year, which adopt many elements of Rolex’s fondly remembered Cellini watches. The first generation featured 39mm gold cases, alligator straps, and a new movement, Caliber 7140, displayed behind a sapphire exhibition caseback. 

What’s New: For 2024, Rolex has unveiled a new Perpetual 1908 model in a platinum case and an elegantly executed ice-blue dial with a guilloché rice-grain motif. The delicate, eye-catching geometrical pattern blossoms in the manner of a rosette on the surface of the dial, which also employs another type of hand-applied guilloché, a crimped, filet sauté pattern, for the minute track. 

Like the gold version that preceded it in the "new-old" 1908 collection last year, the dial hosts distinctly stylish Arabic applied numerals at 3, 6, and 9 o'clock and faceted hands. The 39mm platinum case measures 39mm in diameter, with a coin-edge bezel and fluted lugs, and contains the self-winding Perpetual Caliber 1704, with a 66-hour power reserve. Also like its predecessor, it comes mounted on a dressy leather strap, here in matte brown with Rolex's double-folding "Dualclasp" in the same platinum as the case.