For fifty-four years the Royal Oak has told time. Now, for the first time, it doesn’t have to. Audemars Piguet has unveiled Royal Oak Joaillerie — the maison’s first true high jewellery collection — nineteen creations that take Gérald Genta’s 1972 bracelet, the most recognisable few centimetres of metal in watchmaking, and let it stand alone as necklace, choker, cuff and earring. No movement, no dial; just the architecture, finally admitted to be jewellery of the first rank.
Unveiled during Paris Fashion Week and co-designed with Nathalie Barzilay, the collection divides into three chapters named for the maison’s home valley. Risoud Eclipse sets sugarloaf emeralds — sixteen and a half carats on the necklace alone — into black PVD titanium and white gold. Dream of Joux is the showstopper: a tie necklace of anodised blue titanium whose links are snow-set with 1,670 blue sapphires, carrying forty-two pear-shaped diamonds of a carat and a half each, finished with five- and three-carat pears — some sixty-three carats in motion. Around it orbit cuffs with names like Blue Moon, Tree of Life — 203 cognac sapphires and more than 590 tsavorites — and Sunburst, several of them unique pieces. The third chapter, Frosted Gold, returns to the hammered finish Carolina Bucci created for the Royal Oak’s 40th anniversary, in chokers and cuffs of pink, white and yellow gold.
Chief executive Ilaria Resta calls the collection a gateway to the maison’s past and future, and the logic is hard to fault: the Royal Oak’s tapisserie and integrated bracelet were always as much goldsmithing as engineering, and Jacqueline Dimier’s 1976 reinterpretation for women proved the form’s versatility early. The pieces are reaching selected AP Houses, where Gulf clients — among the Royal Oak’s most ardent collectors — will find prices available on request, as high jewellery etiquette demands.
The bracelet that redefined the luxury watch now makes its case in a new discipline, and on this evidence the oak has lost none of its shade.
