Fashion watch used to be a derogatory term in the world of horology. That, thankfully, is not so much the case these days as watchmakers expand their ideas of who and what they welcome to their highly complicated universes. The Swiss house of Audemars Piguet, an early adopter of this stance, is no stranger to cross-disciplinary collaborations. Its latest: a partnership with Australian couturière Tamara Ralph on a limited-edition Royal Oak Concept Flying Tourbillon.
It is fortuitous timing for Ralph, who recently launched a couture label under her name. “We did a private collection for our top clients in January [2023] at Paris couture week,” recounts Ralph of her new start. It was a call to arms for loyalists of the designer’s modern, feminine aesthetic. Celebrities responded quickly. Halle Berry, Kate Hudson, Naomi Campbell and Queen Rania of Jordan are just some of the big names who wore Tamara Ralph Couture to A-list functions such as the Oscars, Cannes Film Festival and the coronation of King Charles III.
Thinking about how to even start designing a watch stumped Ralph at first, but she quickly tapped into the commonalities of both fields and her own creative process. “Essentially, it is the same as creating couture. How I start a couture process is thinking about each piece individually. I like each piece to have a story and some sort of impact,” she shares. The challenge and inherent difference, of course, is that fashion collections are made up of many looks, whereas with timepieces there’s often a single, definitive model. “It channels your creativity and amplifies it,” says Ralph. “It helped to hone the idea a little bit more.”
Once she started sketching, however, she could not stop. “[Audemars Piguet] were so overwhelmed with the number of sketches I produced for them,” she laughs. Ultimately, Ralph went with a rather surprising concept: cognac, which typically harbours masculine associations. She, however, twisted the notion of the rich liquor to explore its colours as symbols of elegant strength.
“It sits beautifully with the tones and textures of metal, so I looked at mixing rose gold, lighter shades of gold, bronze colours, and different brushed and frosted textures,” she says. The 18-carat pink gold case and bracelet are hammered with a Florentine jewellery technique to create a frosted, textured surface. On the dial, concentric plates of sunburst satin-finished gold in a medley of earthy colours highlight the flying tourbillon, the complication itself caged by concentric rings and set with diamonds.
The watch made its debut in Paris this January at Ralph’s spring couture runway show, where there was an apparent evolution of the designer’s dressmaking. Since becoming a mother and relaunching her couture business after the dissolution of her former label Ralph & Russo, there’s an undercurrent of hardened feminine strength. Details and elements such as chainmail, metal corsets and cage panels, curb chain and gilded flower hardware feature strongly.
Ralph even threw in some nods in that collection to Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak in the form of belts fashioned to look like the integrated bracelet and octagonal bags framed with the eight recognisable screws.
We could go on about the technical details—the hand-wound Calibre 2964 that powers this watch, for one, is exclusive to the references made in collaboration with Ralph. But it might be more apt to appreciate it as an object of beauty that infuses the viewpoint of two different fields, each as valuable as the other. “I like to mix metals when I wear jewellery. That idea of infusing metals makes [the watch] a little more adaptable across different outfits,” shares Ralph of the stylistic considerations behind the earthy palette. Consider them a couturière’s prerogative.
The March ‘Dualism’ issue of Vogue Singapore is available for sale online and in-store from 4 March 2024.
