It’s that time of the year again, when festive events are starting to fill your calendar—and your fashion instincts are quickly homing in on all things sequinned, studded, and ruffled. Maybe a little patent leather, feathered trimmings, or luscious high shine fabrics like velvet, gauze and lamé. And why not? Because nothing heralds a more celebratory mood than putting on something truly head-turning, and here’s where the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak comes in.
Playing with light through a combination of textures and materials, the Royal Oak dazzles with a vivacious spirit from night to day. Through its latest iterations, Audemars Piguet boldly mixes feminine allure with horological finesse, as it creates timepieces designed to stand out, rather than blend in.
Take the Royal Oak Selfwinding “50th Anniversary” in pink gold for instance. Bright light reflects off the famous octagonal bezel’s bevelled edges while the scintillating fire of diamonds are like a halo around the dial. Coloured a soothing khaki green, the dial is also decorated with the Manufacture’s signature Grande Tapisserie pattern consisting of hundreds of small, truncated pyramids set on a base dotted with thousands of tiny diamond shapes. These minuscule details invite the light to dance around the dial in mesmerising fashion.
Meanwhile, the Royal Oak Selfwinding 37mm in pink gold goes the full nine yards with full brilliant cut diamonds. To be precise, 860 all over the case and bracelet, plus another 275 on the dial. Even the indexes are set in baguette cut diamonds.
For the Royal Oak Selfwinding Chronograph 38mm in steel with diamonds, elegant satin-brushing emits a soft glow that juxtaposes beautifully against the mirror-polished bevels around the bezel, case, and bracelet. Studded with a ring of diamonds around the bezel punctuated with hexagonal polished screws, its light blue dial is poetically reminiscent of a frozen pond encircled by ice and snow.
While diamonds are always welcome, Audemars Piguet has also developed a unique way for non-gem-set Royal Oak timepieces to shine with equal fervour, and it’s brilliantly called Frosted Gold. Because it evokes a unique diamond dust effect even without the presence of diamonds; all that shimmer is pure gold. The Manufacture combined this snowy effect with a light blue dial in the Royal Oak Frosted Gold Selfwinding 34mm white gold model, and it comes just in time for the winter season.
Frosted Gold at Audemars Piguet was the result of a collaborative effort with Florentine jewellery designer Carolina Bucci, who uses this technique in her own creations, and who designed the first Frosted Gold model for Audemars Piguet. In her third and latest project with the manufacture, Bucci enhanced the new Royal Oak Selfwinding 34mm in black ceramic with a surprise twist where you’d least expect one.
This striking, black full ceramic Royal Oak offers a dazzling play on contrasts, where satin-finished black ceramic with polished chamfers meets mirror-polished touches in pink gold, but the big reveal lies in the way Bucci completely reimagined the Royal Oak dial. Here, a sapphire plate adorned with tiny squares emulating the Grande Tapisserie pattern is placed atop a brass plate, resulting in a rich prismatic light effect that conjures up all the colours of the rainbow.
Natural light also reveals the true allure of Audemars Piguet’s Haute Horlogerie creations such as the Royal Oak “Jumbo” Extra-Thin Openworked “50th Anniversary”. This 39mm model in white gold exposes movement components finished with refined Haute Horlogerie decorations. Hold it up against the light for a mesmerising view of this intricately open worked timepiece.
Photography: Zantz Han
Stylist: Desmond Lim
Hair and make up: Marc Teng using Oribe and NARS
Manicurist: Ann Lim
Models: Allie Coe/Mannequin Studio, Samira Philipsen/Ave Management, and Anastasia Andrews/Ave Management
Photographer assistants: Jaron Tay and Halid
Fashion assistant: Jiajia Tan
