The 19-piece Royal Oak Joaillerie collection takes Audemars Piguet’s most famous design beyond watchmaking, with necklaces, cuffs and earrings set with diamonds, sapphires and emeralds.
Launching today—smack in the middle of a buzzy, media-frenzied Paris Fashion Week—is the debut Royal Oak Joaillerie collection. Watch fans will instantly clock the name of Audemars Piguet’s signature timepiece, the Swiss watchmaker’s famed 1970s luxury sports watch, but this collection—a 19-piece suite of jewels, featuring necklaces, earrings, cuffs and chokers—seriously expands the Le Brassus-based maker’s repertoire.
Set with precious stones in gold and titanium, the collection marks Audemars Piguet’s boldest foray to date into luxury’s most glittering and promising sector. The design codes of the Royal Oak are out in full force, and fans will immediately recognise the signature interlocking links of the bracelet (which famously plays with light reflection, thanks to a mixture of polished and brushed finishes.
The jewels, meanwhile, riff on elements from the watchmaker’s Vallée de Joux’s home, from frozen lakes to local flowers: the statement-making Dream of Joux tie-style necklace, crafted in white gold and anodised blue titanium, being a fine example. This particular piece is trimmed with 42 pear-shaped diamonds of around 63 carats, and a further 1,670 blue sapphires of over five carats.
A matching set of earrings is topped with eight pear-shaped diamonds of between 1.5 and 3 carats each, paired with 196 blue sapphires. Head-turning gemstones further come courtesy of the Risoud Eclipse necklace and cuff, named after a local forest. Cool and edgy, the blackened titanium and white gold design sparkles with noteworthy emeralds: a necklace with five sugarloaf stones of around 16.5 carats in total, and three emeralds of around 12 carats in the cuff, both pieces sprinkled with diamonds.
There are also six bejewelled cuffs that again nod to nature that is native to Audemars Piguet’s locale. A Sunburst Royal Oak cuff is a joyful spray of orange and yellow sapphires and spessartites. Meanwhile the Blueberries Royal Oak cuff feels more literal in its shimmering depiction of a blueberry bush branch, and is meticulously crafted with 506 leaf-shaped and brilliant-cut diamonds, 19 amethyst cabochons and 16 black spinel cabochons.
Elsewhere, there is a selection of fine jewellery-style chokers and cuffs which will likely pair elegantly with the wearer’s existing Royal Oak watch. They come in Audemars Piguet’s signature Frosted Gold finish, the subtle, shimmering hammered gold look that the watchmaker pioneered with the jeweller Carolina Bucci in 2016, and which is a finish coveted by collectors today: and, no doubt, tomorrow’s grail-seekers.
While daring and slightly unexpected, a purist jewellery collection is not totally off-piste for Audemars Piguet. Since the 19th century, the watchmaker has worked with jewellers including Tiffany, Cartier and Bulgari to create stylist pendant and ring watches. The house established its own jewellery workshop in the 1980s, which later created the likes of the jaw-dropping Baroque cuff watch for the maison’s 125th anniversary, which was set with diamonds, yellow and pink sapphires. More recently, collectors will remember the punk-style Diamond Trilogy secret watch collection from 2015-2017.
Jewellery, right now, is a strong bet: a notable bright spot in the luxury constellation. Amid macroeconomic uncertainty, customers are increasingly forgoing fashion for jewellery, seeing the sector as an investment and embracing a “flight to quality” mode (as strong gold prices further entice purchases). No wonder jewellery is the driving engine at luxury groups like Richemont, whose jewellery maisons posted a 24 per cent growth in its third quarter ending 30 June (watchmakers performed comparatively at eight per cent).
Audemars Piguet has long tried to diversify beyond its Royal Oak icon: expanding, for example, its round-style Code 11.59 watch with new dials and complications over the years since it was first unveiled in 2019.
A dedicated Royal Oak jewellery collection might be seen in terms of the eggs/baskets idiom. Setting their pieces with noteworthy emeralds and sapphires speaks to a growing trend for coloured stones in jewellery, while Audemars Piguet is also clearly tapping into the growing trend of women buying jewellery for themselves.
Indeed, the inspiration from the Royal Oak Joaillerie collection stemmed from Audemars Piguet’s existing clients—namely the popularity of its 23mm Royal Oak Mini. “We saw clients stacking and wearing them almost as jewellery, which showed us that there was a very contemporary way of living with the Royal Oak beyond the watch itself,” says Audemars Piguet’s CEO Ilaria Resta.
One senses that this is just the beginning. Expect the house to expand upon Royal Oak Joaillerie with gusto, just as it did with the original watch five decades-plus ago. “We wanted to explore that design language in a new form,” says Resta. “Rather than reproducing familiar Royal Oak codes, we looked at the bracelet almost as an object in its own right and asked how its geometry, rhythm and movement could translate into jewellery. That opens up a different creative space for us.”
Thoughtful bending of the rules is Audemars Piguet’s modus operandi. Expect jewellery to be an exciting new canvas for that ethos.
