Audemars Piguet
Audemars Piguet holds 1,388 watches in this library, and 1,023 of them, 74 per cent, are a Royal Oak or a Royal Oak Offshore. No other brand here is so nearly one design.
Collections
Royal Oak Offshore
The Royal Oak Offshore is the 1993 enlargement of the Royal Oak, 42 mm where the original was 39 mm.
Royal Oak Concept
The Royal Oak Concept is Audemars Piguet's experimental line, begun in 2002 for the Royal Oak's thirtieth anniversary.
Haute Joaillerie
Classique
Neo Frame
(re)Master
Royal Oak
The Royal Oak is the 1972 Gérald Genta design that made a steel sports watch a luxury object.
CODE 11.59
CODE 11.59 is the round collection Audemars Piguet launched in 2019, its first new line in decades: a round bezel and caseback on an octagonal case…
Jules Audemars
Jules Audemars was Audemars Piguet's round classical collection, named after the company's co-founder.
Millenary
The Millenary is Audemars Piguet's oval watch, introduced in 1995 with a case drawn from the Colosseum and a dial set off-centre.
About Audemars Piguet
Jules Louis Audemars and Edward Auguste Piguet founded the company in Le Brassus, in the Vallée de Joux, in 1875, and it is still owned by the founding families. Its first century was complications: minute repeaters, perpetual calendars, the first jumping-hour wristwatch in 1921 and the thinnest pocket watch of 1925. The second century began in 1972 with Gérald Genta's Royal Oak, a steel watch with an octagonal bezel, eight visible screws and an integrated bracelet, 39 mm wide and priced like gold, on the 3.05 mm 2121 built from Jaeger-LeCoultre's 920. It sold slowly and then it sold everything: the Royal Oak alone is 653 watches here.
Emmanuel Gueit's Royal Oak Offshore of 1993 took the design to 42 mm and 100 m and added the chronograph; it is 370 watches here and the reason 22 per cent of the catalogue is chronographs. The Royal Oak Concept of 2002 became the laboratory for the tourbillons that make up 14 per cent of the brand, the highest share of any brand in the library. CODE 11.59, the round watch of 2019 with 122 references here, the classical Jules Audemars at 120 and the oval Millenary at 66 are the rest.
The movements record the same history. The most common calibers here are the modular 3126/3840 chronograph and the 2385, a Frédéric Piguet 1185 the Piguet piece follows through three maisons; then the in-house 3120 of 2003, and the 4302 three-hander and 4401 flyback chronograph of 2019 that are replacing them, the second described in the chronograph piece. Seventy-nine per cent of the watches are automatic, 15 per cent hand-wound and 5 per cent quartz, and 65 per cent have a display back.
The cases are 59 per cent gold or platinum and 23 per cent steel, with 67 in titanium and ceramic and 18 in sapphire, and the median is 41 mm, the size of the Royal Oak Selfwinding. Water resistance is a dress rating on a sports case, a median of 50 m, and only 17 per cent are rated to 100 m or more. Twenty-seven per cent of the watches here are limited editions, 18 per cent of the scored ones carry a rarity score of 8 or above, and the grand complication is still made, 17 minute repeaters among them.