The Rolex Cellini Dual Time
A masterpiece from a Rolex renaissance.
The discontinuation of the Rolex Milgauss line generated a lot of buzz and a lot of interest in collecting Milgauss watches, when Rolex pulled the plug on them over Watches And Wonders 2023. Slightly less buzzy was the news that the Rolex Cellini line had been discontinued. There were a couple of reasons for this – the first was that at the same time the Cellini watches were taken out of the catalogue, Rolex also introduced the round, gold 1908, so you wouldn’t necessarily feel that a more formal and more traditional dress watch from The Crown was completely out of the picture.
The second reason is that Cellini was always a little bit of a niche proposal – the more popular Rolex Professional models are so well known that there is no need to even name them, but the Cellini watches were much less instantly recognizable. Of course, I don’t think Rolex ever expected them to perform like, say, the Submariner or GMT Master II, but there’s no doubt that for most people, hearing the Rolex name did not immediately evoke the image of a round, gold dress watch. Still, I have always thought that the Cellini watches represented the same basic values as every watch Rolex makes – extremely high quality and an expression of real, traditional Swiss fine watchmaking pursued to the highest level of excellence. It was true of the entire Cellini line and it’s true of course, of this particular example as well – the Cellini Dual Time, one of the most drop-dead gorgeous travel watches ever made.
What’s In A Name?
The Cellini line is named after Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571) who was one of the most skilled, and rightly famed, goldsmiths of the Italian Renaissance, and was also well known for his sculptures, as well as his autobiography. Cellini’s name was chosen for Rolex for the Cellini collection thanks to the incredibly sumptuous and elaborate nature of his goldsmithing – one of his most famous works was a salt cellar made for Francis I of France, and you might think something as mundane as a salt cellar could never be sumptuous, much less make your name known far and wide, but how wrong you would be.
Rolex first began introducing watches under the Cellini name in the late 1960s and over the years it has come to be applied to a very wide range of precious metal watches distinct from the sports and professional models (one of the better known watches made under the Cellini name was the King Midas). The Dual Time was part of a revamp of the collection undertaken by Rolex in 2014, when the company launched three new Cellini models at Baselworld. These were a three-hand time-only model, a three-hand watch with date, and the Cellini Dual Time.
Elegance In The Air
The Cellini Dual Time in Everose gold (Rolex’s proprietary rose gold alloy, which is formulated to resist the oxidation that can sometimes mar rose gold watches and jewelry) is, like the GMT Master, a two time-zone watch, but there, the resemblance ends.
The Dual Time shows home time in a sub-dial at 6:00 and there is a day-night indicator at 9:00 in the sub-dial (white for AM, deep blue for PM). The Dual Time is, yes, a round gold dress watch, but I have always felt that the Cellini watches are recognizable as Rolex timepieces even without the logo and the crown.
For one thing, there is the obsessive attention to design. The Dual Time in profile looks very distinctively Rolex, but the watch is full of details that have been extremely carefully thought through in order to produce an impression of easy elegance. The Dual Time has a coin-edge bezel, whose knurling is picked up by the radiating, “rayon flammé de la gloire” pattern on the dial, and that pattern is repeated again in the sub-dial for home time. The hour markers are thin and almost dramatically elongated, and their length, which might otherwise have seemed exaggerated, is balanced by the minute track, which cuts through each hour marker at its midpoint. It is design that just looks better the longer you look at it – it’s very rich in detail but every element is so well executed and so well balanced that it never strays into anything too baroque.
Will the discontinued Cellini models have their day in the spotlight as collectibles, as has happened to some extent to the Milgauss? There is an excellent chance, I think – the market in general has seen an enormous explosion of interest in sports models in recent years, sure, but there is also strong growing interest in classical, traditional watchmaking and as is usually the case with Rolex, when it comes to value offered in design, and quality, inside and out, the Cellini Dual Time is very hard to beat.