All that Glitters: Audemars Piguet Frosted Gold
“It’s the look. For me, the look is great. The surface is covered in thousands of little waves; waves that capture the light and then shine and sparkle. To be able to wear a watch which you feel and people could think is set with diamonds, and yet there is not a single stone on it—that’s a good one.” With his characteristic boisterous enthusiasm, François Bennahmias, boss of Audemars Piguet, is explaining the appeal of frosted gold, the latest instalment of the brand’s love story with the precious metal.
A couple of years ago, AP launched one of its signature Royal Oak models in yellow gold. From the hoopla that surrounded it you would have thought that Audemars had invented the yellow stuff, rather than reintroduced yellow gold after an absence of seven years, signalling a readiness to move away from the dominance that pink and white gold have had over the industry this century.
Now, with “frosted” gold, Bennahmias has done it again. A couple of years ago he showed me a prototype Royal Oak that had a textured finish more accentuated than the usual mixture of satinated and polished surfaces that characterize the Genta-designed classic. As its name suggests, it looks like a frost has settled on the watch. Although the prototype was made for a woman, I wanted one very badly, but couldn’t afford it. Three years later, he has finally brought out a man’s size: its lure is still strong and I still cannot afford it.
It seems that I am not the only person touched by AP’s love affair with gold watches. “Five years ago, we were selling 5,000 watches in gold. Now we are at 15,000 to 16,000.” That figure represents close to 40 per cent of the marque’s annual production and with each gold Royal Oak weighing around 202 grams, Bennahmias says he gets through one and half tonnes of the stuff a year.
I have a weakness for the textured surface treatment because it recalls the oeuvre of genius jeweller and goldsmith Andrew Grima, whose unconventional textured gold creations were the sine qua non of the sophisticated 1960s and 1970s jet set. Half a century later, it was another London jeweller who gave Bennahmias the idea to try something similar on the Oak.
“It started because Carolina Bucci loved the Royal Oak that she got from her husband. We organized a visit to the factory for her and six or seven friends. When we saw each other again in London, a few months later, I saw some of her frosted jewellery and thought maybe we could do this on our watches. That’s how it started. We sent her a few parts, links from the bracelet: the results were great in terms of look, very bad in terms of feel. They were very harsh. So, I said, ‘Let us try.’ What we did was very soft, but had no look, because the dents were not deep enough. We went back and forth seven times, to find the right depth in the gold, while also keeping the softness.”
At the start, each piece was done by hand in AP’s polishing workshops. “Our polishers were dead by the end of the day,” says Bennahmias. “Because it’s like 12,000 beats per minute…bmbmbmbmbmbmb … so they went home shaking and we were breaking a lot of tools.” It is an intensive process. Each part is hammered, the components are then assembled, edges are polished and then the whole watch is hammered again. At first it took anything up to two days to completely frost a Royal Oak; now, part-automated and part-completed by hand, it still takes several hours.
With the 200-piece run of men’s frosted watches sold out, Bennahmias is not finished. Next up is a Carolina Bucci edition that will use different colours of gold. “You are going to get a rainbow of gold from pink to yellow.”
My guess is that Bennahmias might be getting through more than one and a half tonnes of gold this year.
