Audemars Piguet

While it has always been one of the best respected heritage houses, Audemars Piguet has been able to do what few other contemporaries have managed – transcend watchmaking and embed itself into popular culture. It has done this with well-timed collaborations that have taken the brand to interesting places and new audiences. This continued openness to experimentation, together with a rich history and a compelling and varied offering, means it remains highly coveted.

Audemars Piguet represents a rare meld of blue-blooded watchmaking heritage and a decidedly modern outlook. This has yielded an impressive array of complications with research into accommodating these in slim, wearable cases. The success the brand has had to this end, and its ability to sustain its offering of novelties over the years, is often unfairly overshadowed by the prominence of its most popular creation, the Royal Oak.

While the brand’s catalogue of creations is expansive, we are particularly intrigued by the period when the industry was emerging from the disruption of the 1970s and 80s. Audemars Piguet marked this moment in time with a renewed focus on mechanical innovation, yielding elegant and complicated references, produced in small numbers, with incredible craft and variety on display. It offers enthusiasts of such classically minded, yet modern watchmaking a focussed yet plentiful canvas of examples to study and choose from.