Audemars Piguet CEO François-Henry Bennahmias calls a 300-page illustrated coffee table book about 50 years of the Royal Oak “a bridge between past and future”.
Written by Bill Prince, current acting editor of Wallpaper, but deputy editor and watch guru for British GQ until 2020, Royal Oak: From Iconoclast to Icon, charts the impact of AP’s banker timepiece along its creative, cultural and business journey.
Intelligently, the 296-page book with 400 illustrations devotes considerable space to the decisions and decision-makers that brought to the Royal Oak to life in 1972 and nurtured it, barely changed, through five decades of globalisation, flower power, quartz crisis, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the dawn of the internet and the emergence of China as the biggest watch buying nation on the planet.
Given that the book was commissioned by Audemars Piguet, it is commendably candid about the turmoil engulfing the Swiss mechanical watchmaking industry in the years leading up to the creation of the Gerald Genta-designed Royal Oak fifty years’ ago, and the struggle to establish a steel automatic watch as a luxury item.
The career of Mr Bennahmias, who will step down after a decade as CEO of Audemars Piguet next year, is given some interesting context, including a meeting with rapper Jay-Z in 2001, which showed him the potential of reaching a younger, new money, audience.
Testimonies by the likes of Kevin Hart, Bjarke Ingels, Elle Macpherson, Serena Williams and Ning Zetao demonstrate how successful the strategy has been.
Royal Oak: From Iconoclast to Icon is released this week by Assouline, priced at £195.
