While their sister company, Tudor, has attracted a huge following for its old-fashioned, vintage-style watches, replica Rolex is notorious for improving only in design and never recreating past Rolex-inspired vintage watches. However, while not producing any thoroughly traditional watches, Rolex did achieve some subtle, vintage-inspired design features to other very modern watches they make today. 
Most apparent among the various vintage design elements is the red line of text on the dial of the new Rolex Sea-Dweller reference 126600. An obvious throwback to Rolex’s early Submariner and Sea-Dweller watches which had their respective names printed in red letters on the surfaces of their matte black dials, the red line of text on the dial of the new Sea-Dweller 126600 is an unmistakably vintage-inspired design element, which Rolex has recycled and reintroduced on an otherwise very modern and technologically-advanced, luxury dive watch.
Like the red line on the dial of the latest Sea-Dweller, the bright orange 24-hour arrowhead on the latest Rolex Explorer II is a design element borrowed directly from the original 1971 watch. For a number of decades, this style of 24-hour hand was totally absent from the Rolex watches catalog, during which time, the Explorer II shared a 24-hour hand design with Rolex’s GMT-Master II line of watches.
However, in 2011 for its 40th anniversary, the Explorer II line received a complete change, both inside and out. Even though the big majority of the new Explorer II was entirely different from the original version and classifies it as an undisputedly modern timepiece, the large, orange-colored, arrow-shaped, 24-hour hand is aesthetically almost identical to the one on the original version of the Explorer II from the early 1970s.
An important part of the allure of the fake Rolex GMT-Master II 126710BLRO is rooted in its vintage-inspired design elements, such as its red and blue, “Pepsi” bezel insert and its Jubilee-style bracelet. The very first Rolex GMT-Master watches from the mid-1950s were made from stainless steel and fitted with half-red, half-blue bezel inserts; however, ever since the introduction of Cerachrom bezels, half-red, half-blue “Pepsi” bezel inserts were only available on the 18k white gold version of Rolex’s GMT-Master II.
What’s more, the new black Cerachrom bezel is more than a little reminiscent of the black acrylic bezels that were fitted to some vintage Daytona chronograph references manufactured during the 1960s and 1970s. Although the two materials are greatly different in a multitude of different ways, the black Cerachrom bezel on the new 116500 Daytona is very much the contemporary equivalent of the black acrylic bezel that can be found on a number of highly-desirable, vintage Rolex Daytona references.
In most cases, Rolex replica will just keep pushing their designs as they continue to refine and refine their watches. However, they occasionally borrowed small design elements from some early watches and applied them to the latest version of the evolving watch. Sometimes these design elements are imagined or modernized to reflect the progress and improvement of existing materials and technologies.