udemars Piguet unveils its new Royal Oak Joaillerie collection, building on a long-standing connection to the world of jewellery.
This collection, which debuts with the Haute Joaillerie Risoud Eclipse and Dream of Joux creations, alongside a Frosted Gold series, draws on the pioneering spirit of the Royal Oak and revisits the distinctive geometry of its bracelet. Blending multidisciplinary expertise, architectural lines and contemporary elegance, its pattern of sculpted links plays with proportions, texture and light, while metaphorically connecting past and future, watchmaking and jewellery, technical precision and artistic freedom.
Each creation also takes inspiration from the Vallée de Joux in the Swiss Jura, where Audemars Piguet has been rooted since 1875. Symbols of the brand’s daring ethos and emotional resonance, these versatile designs disrupt traditional high jewellery and open up new avenues of creative expression.
The Royal Oak’s striking geometry, daring character and natural affinity with jewellery provided the inspiration for the collection. Imagined by jewellery and watch designer Gérald Genta, this sport-chic timepiece revolutionised watchmaking when it was launched in 1972. With its large body of hand-finished stainless steel, its octagonal bezel secured with hexagonal screws, its integrated steel bracelet and its extra-thin selfwinding mechanism, this wristwatch marked the beginning of a new era in tune with evolving lifestyles.
In 1976, Jacqueline Dimier, Audemars Piguet’s first in-house designer, reinterpreted the Royal Oak for women, refining its proportions to further reveal the intricacies of its multifaceted surfaces. Her work established the Royal Oak as a design language able to evolve across materials, sizes, generations and genders. In the 1990s, Emmanuel Gueit, Dimier’s tandem, expanded the aesthetic possibilities of the Royal Oak once more with the introduction of the muscular Royal Oak Offshore and a line of Royal Oak jewellery.
Combining sportiness with ancestral know-how, the Royal Oak was imbued from the outset with a sensibility usually associated with jewellery. The satin brushing and polished chamfers adorning its case and bracelet not only elevated steel to the same status as gold but also generated a distinctive interplay of light reminiscent of a diamond’s facets.
This meticulous alternation of hand finishes has since become synonymous with the Manufacture’s exacting craftsmanship. In addition, the bracelet’s pattern of tapering links and studs, all decorated and assembled by hand, brought together the seemingly incompatible worlds of jewellery and sports watches.
By playing with these aesthetic codes, the Royal Oak Joaillerie collection unveils new versatile and expressive designs, crafted to accompany the stories and moments of today’s generations.
The new jewellery collection brings the aesthetic codes of the Royal Oak in conversation with Audemars Piguet’s home in the Vallée de Joux through evocative motifs, symbolic textures, colour gradients and material sensations.
The valley’s multifaceted landscape is first reinterpreted in the Dream of Joux line through sophisticated gemsetting adding depth, rhythmic harmony and sensual resonance to its bold architecture. Frozen lakes, clear night skies and floral motifs come to life in a series of one-of-a-kind 18-carat white, yellow and pink gold cuffs, enriched with a palette of deep blues, vibrant greens, vivid pinks and solar tones.
Each design is created using carefully selected gemstones, including diamonds, sapphires, spessartites, tourmalines, amethysts, tsavorites and topazes. The Dream of Joux line also encompasses a set of matching tie necklace and drop earrings evoking a wintry wonderland with their cascading pear-shaped diamonds and anodised blue titanium links snow set with blue sapphires. Varying in diameter, the sapphires are set side by side to completely cover the links and studs, giving them a unique shimmer.
The Risoud Eclipse alludes to the Vallée de Joux’s pivotal role for celestial observation, reimagining the Risoud Forest under a shadowed sky, with the subtle halo of an eclipse. The line’s inaugural necklace and matching cuff feature black PVD titanium links and studs, offset by striking central sugarloaf emeralds surrounded by brilliant-cut diamonds. The emeralds’ conical facets have been meticulously ground and polished to let the light in from all angles and bring out their vibrant colour. The Manufacture’s alternation of satin brushing and polished chamfers gracing the links and studs amplifies the stones’ lustre.
Lastly, a distinct series of cuffs and necklaces sparkling with 18-carat white, pink and yellow Frosted Gold captures the ever-changing luminosity of the Vallée de Joux. Based on an ancient Florentine technique, this decoration pattern was developed in collaboration with jewellery designer Carolina Bucci in 2016 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Royal Oak for women and has since become one of Audemars Piguet’s signature finishes. The diamond dust effect, achieved by gently hammering the precious metal with a diamond-tipped tool, is accentuated by mirror-polished studs and polished chamfers for endless light effects.
Jewellery is closely linked to watchmaking and has long contributed to the evolution of expertise at Audemars Piguet, encouraging craftspeople to push technical boundaries and elevate artisanal expression. Since the 19th century, the Manufacture has leveraged high jewellery and metalworking métiers d’art to break new grounds in miniaturisation, gemsetting and aesthetic refinement. The company worked hand in hand with renowned jewellers, including Tiffany, Cartier, Oscar Heyman and Bvlgari, to craft diminutive pendant, brooch and ring watches as well as avant-garde timepieces embellished with enamel, engraving and gemstones.
The increasing popularity of the wristwatch in the 20th century opened up new avenues, enabling the brand’s artisans to experiment with shapes, materials and ornamentation in unprecedented ways. One notable example is the “Tutti Frutti” timepiece which was sold in 1929 and equipped with the Calibre 5/7SB, the smallest movement ever produced by Audemars Piguet. The external parts, which incorporated diamonds, emeralds, rubies as well as blue and yellow sapphires, were created by the Parisian jeweller Egouvillon Lafon & Cie Paris (Audemars Piguet Heritage Collection, Inv. 1378).
In the 1980s, the growing trend for watches with welded bracelets spurred Audemars Piguet to establish its own jewellery workshop. This enabled the company to progressively craft distinctive gem-set timepieces in-house, reaching its zenith in the early 2000s with the manufacturing of bespoke Haute Joaillerie creations and watches.
The one-of-a-kind 18-carat pink gold Baroque cuff watch paved with brilliant-cut diamonds and oval yellow and pink sapphires (Audemars Piguet Heritage, Inv. 1348), released in 2000 for the Manufacture’s 125th anniversary, is typical of this era. In the following years, high jewellery watches were frequently matched with jewellery sets interweaving inventive designs with exceptional gemsetting, culminating in the Millenary Précieuse line. These creations paved the way for the brand’s Haute Joaillerie watch collection, launched in 2013. Blending striking gemsetting with design cues inspired by the Vallée de Joux, pieces such as the Diamond Trilogy (2015–2017) and the Sapphire Orbe (2019) disrupted traditional ideas of gem-set watches.
Building on this legacy, the Manufacture continues to explore and hone jewellery techniques with the Royal Oak Joaillerie collection which embodies the brand’s free spirit, creative mindset and commitment to uncompromising craftsmanship.
