The avant-garde icon Few watch designs remain as relevant decades after they were launched as the Royal Oak. A brief history

The avant-garde icon

Few watch designs remain as relevant decades after they were launched as the Royal Oak. A brief history

 

For four decades, Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak timepieces have straddled the worlds of the classic and the contemporary. Somehow, the original Royal Oak design seems every bit as relevant in 2012 as it did when it was first unveiled at the Basel fair way back in 1972. Even watch connoisseurs will be hard-pressed, at first glance, to tell the difference between the original 1972 Royal Oak and the new Extra-Thin Royal Oak 39mm launched this year in Geneva to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the design. So timeless is the original design that it has required no tweaking at all.

The 2012 edition of the Royal Oak.

This longevity is remarkable for an industry such as the Swiss watch industry that is so obsessed with history. Many brands have collections and references that go back several decades. Cartier’s Tank, for instance, was first designed in 1917. But few brands have designs that have needed as little modification or evolution as the Royal Oak. And this is all remarkable given the design’s unique origins. That story is the stuff of watchmaking legend.Watch designs are not conceived overnight. Brands—especially those of the calibre of Audemars Piguet—spend months, and even years, looking at the inside and outside of a potential design before giving it the green signal for a public release. Even when it comes to unveiling prototypes, brands can be extremely testy about design codes, standards and quality.
The Royal Oak, however, was born overnight. One evening in 1971, shortly before the start of that year’s Basel fair watch exhibition, designer extraordinaire Gérald Genta got a phone call from Georges Golay, then managing director of Audemars Piguet. Golay told him that the Italian market was pining for an “unprecedented steel watch” and Genta was expected to submit a design the next morning. What set apart Genta’s approach to watchdesigning, right up till his death in August 2011, was his willingness to think fresh. In a career studded with astonishing successes, Genta preferred to come up with new designs for watches rather than dip into the archives.
Which is why, the next morning, when he showed Golay his sketch for the Royal Oak, Golay was shocked. In a 2006 interview with Revolution magazine, Genta recalled Golay’s exact words: “This is not an Audemars Piguet!” Today, the Royal Oak is by far the most easily recognized—and copied—line for the brand. But in the early 1970s,
Genta’s muscular, steel design with exposed bolts and structural elements was a pole apart from the prevalent Audemars Piguet style—thin dress watches in precious metals and high complications.

(left) The original sketch by Gérald Genta; and an exploded view of a Royal Oak watch.

Genta’s design was not only innovative and ambitious, but also tremendously difficult to produce. Machining pieces of high-grade steel to Genta’s specifications were so difficult that the first prototype was made with the much softer white gold. (That prototype was later sold to the Shah of Iran.)When the watch was finally unveiled at the Basel fair in 1972, it was welcomed with a furore and more than a little derision. Not only had Audemars Piguet dared to make a luxury sports watch, but that too in steel, and at a price of 3,300 Swiss francs. This was an unheard of sum for a steel watch. According to watch lore, many visitors not only dismissed the product, but also the brand. In a recent interview, with Haute Times website’s Jack Forster, Martin Wehrli recalled how many visitors to the Audemars Piguet booth seemed bewildered. Wehrli, curator of the Audemars Piguet Museum, remembered visitors who would congratulate the brand before “...going around the corner and saying, they’ll be bankrupt in six months”.

The Royal Oak was not an immediate success. But, on the back of a powerful marketing campaign, demand began to pick up. Soon not only was it flying off the shelves, but was also beginning to spawn a whole series of imitators at every price point and in every segment. (Incidentally, many of these brands would turn to Genta for their own steel designs. But, for some time after the watch had become a success, the designer had remained anonymous, as was the practice at the time. It was only some diligent work by Japanese media that revealed Genta’s handiwork.)The inspiration for the design is interesting. The name, unsurprisingly, has nautical roots. Between 1664 and 1939, Britain’s Royal Navy had eight ships named the Royal Oak. The name Royal Oak itself comes from the name of an oak tree in which King Charles II of England hid himself while escaping from parliamentarian soldiers during the English Civil War. The name is still popular, and, according to one estimate, Royal Oak is the third most popular name for a pub in Britain after Crown and Red Lion.
Genta himself chose a nautical theme, it is believed, after seeing a diver clamber out of Lake Geneva, dressed in an old-fashioned canvas suit and brass helmet. While the iconic bezel of the Royal Oak is reminiscent of portholes on a ship, Genta said that he was inspired by the design of the diver’s brass helmet.

The 1972 Royal Oak line.

The original Royal Oak is rich in signature details. First of all, there is the precisely machined 39mm case—too large 40 years ago, but entirely de rigeur today. The masculine, chunky bezel is crafted into a soft octagon, held in place by eight hexagonal screws made of white gold. The signature blue dial is a “Petite Tapisserie” network of small squares interspersed with grooves crafted using the ramolayé or pounced ornament technique. The new Extra-Thin Royal Oak commemorative edition launched this year is almost a perfect facsimile of all these nuances. The only way to tell the pieces apart is by the colour of the date disc, which is white in the 1972 piece, but blue in the new reference. And inside the watch, as in the original, beats the 2121 automatic calibre. At just 3.05mm thickness, it is still the thinnest fulldiameter-rotor automatic movement in the world.Over the last 40 years, Audemars Piguet has launched more than 100 variants of the Royal Oak. In 1993, the wildly popular Royal Oak Offshore line was introduced, featuring a sportier, chunkier interpretation of the original.
With four decades of booming sales behind it, the Royal Oak shows no signs of slowing down in popularity. This consistency is testimony not only to the quality of the watch and Audemars Piguet’s storied watchmaking abilities, but also to Gérald Genta’s outstanding vision.