It’s no secret that I am a fan of the fake Rolex GMT-Master II UK with the blue and black bezel – a watch known as “Batman” to some. There’s something strangely magnetic about that watch. And one reason that I am drawn to it is that it strikes me as a pure piece of modern perfect replica Rolex design and manufacturing. The bezel colors paired with the overall contemporary styling of the numerals and case proportions make it a quintessential modern offering from the Crown. This isn’t a re-issue or a new interpretation of something old. There is no vintage predicate for it. But what if there was?
This year, when the new updated luxury super clone Rolex Air-King was announced at Watches & Wonders, it struck me in the same way my Batman does. It bears the vintage Air-King moniker, in the equally vintage typeface, but there’s no cheap copy Rolex Air-King of yore to which it directly calls back. It’s a reinvention of the form with no forebear.
It was actually this new 1:1 fake Rolex Air-King which led me to a twisted thought exercise: imagine what presently non-existent vintage Rolex super clone watches online might look like if they did exist. My adventure began with the Air-King because, to my mind, it is the most outlandish model to come out of Rolex in some time. And its outlandishness is not paired with some highfalutin complication like, say, the Yacht-Master II (A watch that you won’t find here today because – well – I couldn’t do it justice with my rudimentary graphic design skills). No, the top fake Rolex Air-King is a time-only watch. So I began to think how it might look, say, 40 years ago.
My first thought is it would have to be larger than standard 34mm Swiss made super clone Rolex Air-Kings due to the colorful design. I figured it would be a model that would sit side-by-side with the Rolex Explorer 1016 in display cases. So 36mm was my number. And since AAA copy Rolex is nothing if not economical, I figured the dial design would borrow heavily from the 1016 much the way the modern Rolex Air-King replica for sale shares the three, six, and nine with the modern Explorer. I then worked to create a vintage-evocative numeral set for the pilot-style Arabic numerals adorning the dial which I took from vintage Oyster Perpetuals of the past.
The result is a high quality super clone Rolex that I think works in the vintage context. In fact, it almost changed my perspective of the modern execution. I decided to give my vintage piece crown guards and imagined that the 2022 refresh was actually a return to tradition in my invented universe. Would I see this best copy watch differently today if this watch really existed? Who’s to say, but being able to manifest this 36mm yellow and green Rolex Air-King replica paypal on a computer screen was satisfying, nonetheless.