Audemars Piguet Royal Oak: Gerald Genta's Steel Gamble

On April 15, 1972, Audemars Piguet unveiled a steel watch at the Basel fair and priced it above many gold watches. It had an octagonal bezel held down with exposed screws, a bracelet that flowed straight out of the case and a name borrowed from British warships. The Royal Oak looked like nothing else in Switzerland.

A phone call and a long night

The timing was terrible, which is the point. Swiss watchmaking was being squeezed by cheap, accurate quartz from Japan, and a house like Audemars Piguet, small and family owned in the Vallée de Joux, had every reason to play safe. Instead, the idea for a luxury steel sports watch came from Carlo de Marchi, the brand's agent in Italy, and managing director Georges Golay took it to Gerald Genta.

The house legend is that Genta was asked on the eve of the Basel fair and delivered the design the next morning. Like most watch legends it has been polished with retelling, and the dates shift depending on who tells it. The shape that came out of that night is the part nobody argues about.

The visual source was a deep sea diving helmet, with its bolted faceplate. Genta turned that into an octagonal bezel fixed with hexagonal screws, set on a tonneau case. The dial got a fine grid of raised squares, the Petite Tapisserie pattern made by the dial specialist Stern Frères. The bracelet was integrated, so case and band read as a single piece of metal. Nobody had dressed steel up like that before.

The 5402 and its thin heart

The first reference was the 5402ST, a 39mm case that looked enormous at the time and later earned the nickname Jumbo. It was also very thin, around 7mm, and that thinness came from the movement. Audemars Piguet used the calibre 2121, an automatic derived from Jaeger-LeCoultre's calibre 920 and only about 3.05mm thick.

Then there was the price. The exact Swiss franc figure varies depending on who you read, but the sources agree on the shape of it. The Royal Oak was the most expensive steel watch on the market, priced above a gold Patek Philippe dress watch and many times the cost of a Rolex Submariner. Charging a precious-metal price for a base-metal watch was the actual innovation. Genta drew the octagon, but the audacity was Golay's.

It was not an overnight hit. Dealers were slow to warm to it, and the first production run reportedly took years to sell through. The 5402 was effectively the only Royal Oak for about four years, until Jacqueline Dimier designed the first women's model, reference 8638, in 1976. Gold and two-tone versions arrived in 1977, and from there the collection never stopped growing.

Even the house hedged its bet. Audemars Piguet built quartz watches in those years too, and quartz versions of the Royal Oak itself joined the catalog. It is easy to forget now, with the Royal Oak treated as a mechanical trophy, how real the pressure from battery watches felt inside Swiss workshops at the end of the 1970s.

Why is it called the Royal Oak?

The name comes from the Royal Navy, which gave the name HMS Royal Oak to a line of warships honoring the oak tree where the future Charles II hid after losing the Battle of Worcester in 1651. A watch that took its look from diving gear and its name from battleships was making a clear statement about the kind of man it expected on the other end of the bracelet.

From the Beast to the 16202

The second big swing came in 1993 with the Royal Oak Offshore, a 42mm case about 15mm thick that critics nicknamed the Beast. It took the octagon and blew it up for a decade of oversized watches, and Arnold Schwarzenegger later wore a custom Offshore in the film End of Days. It set the template for the chunky luxury sports watch.

The original kept quietly evolving. The ultra-thin perpetual calendars of the 1980s, the Royal Oak Concept for the 30th anniversary in 2002 and decades of gold, platinum and skeleton variations all hang off the same octagon. For the 50th anniversary in 2022, Audemars Piguet retired the 15202 and, finally, the calibre 2121. The new 16202 keeps the 39mm Jumbo case at 8.1mm and runs the calibre 7121, which beats at 4Hz instead of 2.75Hz, extends the power reserve from 40 hours to 55 and adds a quickset date.

Genta went on to draw the Patek Philippe Nautilus, and the steel sports watch he invented became one of the most chased categories in the business. It sits at the far end of the dial from the Cartier Tank, which hides everything, and close in spirit to the industrial honesty of the Omega Speedmaster. Read more in watch history and industrial design, or browse the Quiet Menace watches section. Sotheby's has a thorough timeline of the Royal Oak's evolution, and Hypebeast covered the 2022 Jumbo Extra-Thin launch.

Turn a 2022 anniversary 16202 over and the rotor, cut from solid 22-karat gold, carries a 50th anniversary logo, half a century after Genta's long night at the drawing board.