The watch born from the jet age
The GMT-Master exists because of a specific moment in history: the dawn of long-haul jet travel in the 1950s, when Pan American World Airways needed a watch that let its pilots track two time zones at once across the new transatlantic routes. Rolex's answer added a fourth hand making one rotation per 24 hours and a rotating 24-hour bezel, so a pilot could read home time and local time simultaneously. The reference 1675, produced from roughly 1959 to 1980, was the GMT-Master that turned this tool into an icon — a two-decade run that, like the Submariner 5513 it parallels, makes it both a cultural touchstone and a deep well of collectible variation. It ran on the caliber 1565 and later the hacking 1575, the same dependable architecture underpinning the era's Datejusts and Submariners.
"Pepsi," and the romance of the bezel
The 1675's defining feature is its bezel: the original red-and-blue insert, universally nicknamed "Pepsi," with the two colors marking day and night hours. The color scheme was functional — it let a pilot distinguish a.m. from p.m. at a glance — but it became one of the most recognizable design signatures in all of watchmaking, spawning the "Coke" (red-black) and "root beer" (brown-gold) variants that followed. Faded Pepsi bezels, where decades of sun have softened the red to pink and the blue to grey, are now specifically prized — the same aesthetic-of-decay logic that values the Submariner's tropical dials and ghost bezels. The bezel that began as an instrument-reading aid is now the emotional center of the watch.
Like the 5513, the 1675's long run makes it a forensic curriculum. The earliest examples have glossy gilt dials and pointed crown guards (PCG) — a transitional case feature prized by collectors — before the shift to matte dials and the more common crown-guard shape around the mid-1960s. Underline dials, chapter-ring variations, the radium-to-tritium transition, and the gilt-to-matte progression all create a ladder of desirability and price that mirrors the Submariner's, and learning to read a 1675 is, like the 5513, a way of learning to read vintage Rolex as a whole. The two references are the twin classrooms of the field.
The travel-watch tradition it anchors
The 1675's significance extends beyond Rolex: it is the watch that established the dual-time travel complication as a permanent category, the ancestor of every GMT and worldtimer pitched at the traveler. The complication answered a real need created by a specific technology — the jet airliner — and like the dive watch and the chronograph, it is an instrument whose original purpose has been superseded (a phone shows world time instantly) but whose romance endures precisely because it encodes an era. To wear a 1675 is to wear the jet age, the moment when crossing oceans in hours became ordinary and a watch had to keep up.
Why it remains a cornerstone
The 1675 occupies the same beloved middle ground as the 5513: produced in real numbers over two decades, mechanically robust, genuinely wearable, and deeply studied, it is a vintage Rolex a collector can actually acquire and use while still engaging with a rich world of variation and connoisseurship. It sits alongside the Submariner and the Daytona as one of the three pillars of vintage Rolex collecting — the GMT representing the travel tradition as the Submariner represents diving and the Daytona racing. Together they form the core curriculum of the most collected brand in the world, and the 1675, with its Pepsi bezel and jet-age story, is the most romantic of the three.
The GMT-Master 1675 is the jet age on the wrist: a dual-time tool built for Pan Am pilots, crowned with the Pepsi bezel that became one of watchmaking's most beloved signatures, and produced across two decades of gilt and matte variation that make it a forensic playground to rival the Submariner. It anchors the travel-watch tradition and stands as one of the three pillars of vintage Rolex — the most romantic instrument of the three.