Time Travel: An Introduction to Audemars Piguet’s Vintage Watches
From an incredible quarter-repeating pocket watch from 1875 to the world’s first perpetual calendar wristwatch with leap-year display, we give you a glimpse into Audemars Piguet’s exceptional history in watchmaking from the mid 20th century and beyond
Ask a dozen collectors what it is that attracts them to vintage watches and you’re sure to get a dozen different answers. My own answer to this question has changed as time has gone by. Today I find myself at the opposite end of the spectrum of my earlier maximalist predispositions, drawn to a more nuanced aesthetic. There’s something about a design that doesn’t shout for attention, but coyly invites us closer, confident in what it offers. Call it horological hard-to-get. Combine this look and feel with a technically superb, beautiful movement and all the right ingredients are in place.
There’s no shortage of great watchmaking houses that tick the proverbial boxes when it comes to quality vintage offerings, but one in particular has, until very recently, largely evaded the spotlight, maintaining a small but passionate following of devoted collectors.
It’s been 50 years since Gerald Genta deified the octagon. Like many human endeavours that are initially met with resistance and eventually recognized as great, the Royal Oak drew its fair share of criticism at the time of the launch. Reportedly, one of the executive's at AP's competing firm, even announced his intention to buy Audemars Piguet once the company inevitably went bankrupt after this massive ‘blunder’.
Of course, history has laid bare the foolishness of this statement. Prized iterations of the Royal Oak are presently fetching princely sums at auction. The buzz is, of course, earnest and well merited (who am I to argue the results of a free market?), but we’re not here for the Royal Oak - at least not today. Instead we’re going to examine the formative decades that preceded Genta’s final octagonal hurrah - years characterized by low production numbers, unique chronographs and perpetual calendars and beautiful time-only watches of an elevated disposition.
Genta’s tenure at Audemars Piguet gives us a unique window into the evolution of his creative process and answers the question on what a capable artist and designer could accomplish if given the full creative control over one of Switzerland's foundational watchmaking maison. His idiosyncrasies shaped the look and feel of the brand from 1953 until the launch of the Royal Oak in 1972. The form of every Audemars Piguet timepiece that left the bench over these two decades was his express conception.
Long before Genta’s aesthetic modernized the look and feel of the brand, a modern take on “outsourcing” initially popularized in the Vallée de Joux enabled Audemars Piguet’s early dominance in complicated watches. The many small, family owned watchmakers that peppered the valley discovered that by narrowing their focus and producing only a single or a small number of parts they could achieve a previously unattainable level of precision. A finished Audemars Piguet “VZ”, a movement based on the Valjoux movement blank and held in high esteem by both the brand and collectors alike, contained parts produced by several independent specialists contracted by Audemars Piguet.
Audemars Piguet’s exceptional quality attracted a number of distinguished patrons. In 1914, the ever-pragmatic Austro-Hungarian Emperor Francis Joseph commissioned a special pocket watch that included a barometer and compass.
In the early 20th century AP was producing anywhere from a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand watches per annum, a practice that would continue unchanged until the second half of the century. The crash of 1929 dealt a severe blow to Audemars Piguet in the form of the insolvency of Metric Watch Co, a New York retail partner who at that point accounted for over half of their total sales. This constriction of capital had a severe effect on production - Brunner’s ‘Audemars Piguet: Le Maître de l’Horlogerie’ shows only two separate serial numbers leaving the bench in 1932. By the end of the 1940s production had somewhat recovered to a range in the high hundreds to low thousands per year.
As the wristwatch overtook the pocket watch in popularity in the early 20th century, Audemars Piguet began a transition away from the predominant production of complicated watches to mostly time-only watches. By the time the 1930s, 40s and 50s came around, a complicated Audemars Piguet was a rarefied thing. During this time period a total of 307 complicated watches were produced, out of which 20 were double complications. By contrast the Patek Philippe 2499, (considered by the author to be one of the most beautiful Patek chronographs ever made), was produced in a total of 349 examples.
In 1951, two years before Genta began working with the company, Audemars Piguet had transitioned to a serialized production model. Remarkably, up until this point, manufacturing was not performed in standard, serialized runs identified by reference number. Rather, each watch produced was a completely unique creation whose characteristics were often determined by the individual retailers or the clients themselves.
These pre-serialized pieces are characterized by a classic aesthetic and are found in a variety of case metals, shapes and sizes, although 35mm and up are quite rare and, in the right configuration, very desirable.
Given all the above, a more complete picture of the brand emerges and presents the modern collector with an opportunity to admire beautiful things of interesting historical provenance without the hype that tends to accompany such things. Bringing their own distinct flavor, the mid century offerings of Audemars Piguet still exist as attainable alternatives to clout-laden heavyweights like Patek Philippe and Rolex - providing you’re patient and diligent enough.
When Hodinkee’s founder, the cashmere-clad Ben Clymer, appropriately described vintage Audemars Piguet as “the greatest secret in watch collecting”, and “something to be celebrated”, I couldn’t help but agree.
