Advertising is the science of amplification for commercial effect and so it is rare to find an advertisement that tells it exactly as it is. And yet in 1994, that is precisely what US luxury Audemars Piguet replica watches did when it ran an ad with the slogan, “One of the great designs of this century. And probably the next.”
The 1:1 AAA fake watches it was suggesting you buy was the Royal Oak and the advertisement said no more and no less than was true. Read it again and you will notice the words “timepiece”, “watch” or “wristwatch” do not appear. It is quite simply one of the great designs of anything ever, right up there with the Eames chair, the Coca-Cola bottle and Levi’s 501 jeans.
The perfect Audemars Piguet Royal Oak replica watches will be 50 years old next year, but you wouldn’t know it. I cannot claim the precocity of having been aware of the first model in 1972 – at seven years old I was too young to attend the Basel watch fair – but I first became aware of it in the late 1980s and it struck me then as it does now: distinctive and desirable.
Anybody who knows anything about best Swiss copy watches will be able to tell you the design was created by Gérald Genta four years before his other masterpiece, the 21st-century super-grail Patek Philippe Nautilus. The creation myth of the Swiss movements replica Audemars Piguet Royal Oak watches has passed into Swiss folklore. It was 4pm on the day before the Swiss Watch Fair and Genta received a call from Georges Golay, the legendary managing director of top Audemars Piguet fake watches, who needed a design by the following morning to present to AP’s French and Italian distributors. The drawings Genta produced showed a watch of a type not seen before: it was inspired by a childhood memory of seeing a diver being sealed into an old-fashioned diving suit with porthole-style glass in the domed helmet.
Relatively large, given the prevailing tastes of the day, it treated steel with the sort of reverence (and pricing) normally reserved for gold. The complex bracelet, a shimmering mixture of brushed and polished surfaces with tapering angles, was totally integrated into the cheap replica watches head: watch and bracelet were conceived as an aesthetic whole rather than two elements to be brought together. The case was as extraordinary as the bracelet: the octagonal bezel (brushed and polished again) was punctuated with countersunk hexagonal screw heads of white gold, the only precious metal on the super clone watches online store.
It is not that there had not been steel replica watches shop site before: just not from Audemars Piguet. For a brand at the time associated with gold dress watches and having a long history in complications, this was radical.
The success of the Royal Oak can be assessed not just by the longevity of the design, but by the ubiquity of integrated case and bracelet steel sports fake watches for sale from haute horlogerie brands today. Had the Royal Oak been a flop, there may not have been a Nautilus. But the two Genta designs are still very much alive in the here and now, and whether it is Chopard’s Alpine Eagle or A Lange & Söhne’s Odysseus, the grande luxe steel sports watch, on which as much care is lavished on the bracelet as the case, is a market sector all of its own.
The 2021 replica Audemars Piguet Royal Oak watches case now houses all sorts of complications, is available in a variety of metals and, in spite of launches of other models over the years, is the best-known AP by far. The only other AP that comes close is – yes, you guessed it – another Royal Oak, the Offshore.
I can actually remember the launch of the China fake Audemars Piguet Offshore watches in 1993 and the effect was electric. It was huge – in gold it weighed about half a kilo. Part of the size was accounted for by the use, in early models, of the Faraday cage-type construction that protected the movement from magnetism, but the other part of it was just attitude. It was as daring as the original had been and it had its critics – even Genta distanced himself from this steroidal iteration, which was the work of a young designer called Emmanuel Gueit.
While it was attention-grabbing, I do not recall seeing many being worn for the first few years. Indeed, that was the reason I bought one, because I feared it would prove too extreme for the market and would be phased out. All I can say is that I would have made a lousy fortune teller, as not only did it prove to be a winner (accounting for roughly half of Royal Oak production after a few years), but it was a prescient precursor of the huge replica watches paypal that came to dominate the industry for at least the first decade of the current century. And, like its illustrious forebear, that particular Offshore began to appear in numerous iterations and variations.
The most recent launch, of a 42mm automatic chrono, shows just what a classic it has become: the original “12, nine, six” sub-dial configuration has been retained, but legibility has been enhanced with stark contrasts that work particularly well with the teal-blue “Méga Tapisserie” dial of the stainless-steel version. Good luck finding one that has not been reserved for a wait-listed client, but however difficult it might be to track down, whatever fake Audemars Piguet watches for men brings out to celebrate the original Royal Oak’s 50th birthday next year will be ten times harder to get hold of.
