One of the many legends that surround the launch of the Royal Oak – Audemars Piguet’s pioneering foray into the luxury sports watch market – is that the initial sell-through in 1972 was sluggish.
One reason was a lack of availability: its designer, Gerald Genta, had ensured that one of its ground-breaking features would be an elegantly supple, fully integrated bracelet that required each of its 154 different elements be individually fashioned and finished before assembly.
Befitting a designer who trained as a jeweller before switching to watches, Genta expected a similar exactitude in its execution. However, by substituting more malleable gold with the Royal Oak’s landmark use of satin-brushed and polished steel, the bracelet’s elaborate yet distinctive construction put considerable pressure on those charged with creating that first run.
History records it was worth the wait; besides inventing an entirely new category of timepiece, Genta introduced the sublime to the hitherto utilitarian nature of ‘tool’ watches in a manner that established the Royal Oak – in the words of Audemars Piguet’s CEO, Ilaria Resta, as ‘beyond an icon’, defined, she says, as something that ‘can survive the test of time; the test of materials and taste, and can live forever.’
More than half a century on, evidence of the Royal Oak’s tenure at the top table of all-time great designs can be found in the new high jewellery collection from Audemars Piguet that takes as its starting point that emblematic bracelet, at the same time it explores some of the signature style moves it’s made along the way. This started with Jacqueline Dimier’s design for a smaller model, launched in 1976, which debuted the use of precious metals in the collection, joined more recently by Frosted Gold, an ancient Florentine technique launched in conjunction with jeweller Carolina Bucci to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Dimier’s first creations.
Along the way, Audemars Piguet has offered collections of jewellery designed to complement its model range, helping to forge a link back to the early days of the company when, besides creating its own decorated examples, it supplied movements to jewellery houses keen to introduce a novel functionality to their pieces.
In this regard, the Royal Oak has presented a particularly beneficent design, sharing its characteristic octagonal bezel and distinctive ‘petite tapisserie’ dial pattern across bracelets, earrings, cufflinks and the like. However the new Royal Oak Joallerie collection is a step out and up. Designed in-house and destined to be sold at private trunk shows, it comprises one-of-a-kind and customisable pieces that enshrine the artistic attributes of their source while – in the use of texture, material and colour – embedding them in the region where the Royal Oak was born. Thus the Dream of Joux line seeks to conjure the frozen lakes, clear skies and deeply wooded landscape that surround Audemars Piguet’s home in Le Brassus, in the Vallee de Joux, as a series of one-of-a-kind 18-carat white, yellow and pink gold cuffs set with diamonds, sapphires, spessartites, tourmalines, amethysts, tsavorites and topazes. A matching tie necklace and drop earrings set features anodised blue titanium links set with blue sapphires.
Capturing the night sky above the Risoud Forest, which flanks the western edge of the Vallee de Joux, is the Risoud Eclipse collection. This offers a necklace and matching cuff in black PVD titanium into which has been set brilliant-cut diamonds surrounding central sugarloaf emeralds. Finally, a series of cuffs and necklaces in 18-carat white, pink and yellow Frosted Gold, accented with mirror-polished studs and polished chamfers, summon a sensation surely familiar to Genta, who, in a 2011 interview, recalled seeing light ‘singing’ on his bracelet.
‘The truth is, Geral Genta created an iconic watch,’ says Resta. ‘But even more, he created an iconic statement bracelet. And that's why we truly wanted to give homage to one of the assets that belong to Audemars Piguet, and give meaning to a bracelet that can live on its own.’