Audemars Piguet Just Unveiled a Daring New Watch

Can a watch be too iconic? Believe it or not, it’s a question more than one Swiss luxury house has had to ask itself over the past decade. Patek Philippe discontinued a version of its sporty Nautilus, a steel blue-dial watch with a legendarily long wait list, out of fear the watch was becoming bigger than the brand. Audemars Piguet has long sought out a worthy successor to its A-plus-list watch, the Royal Oak, through the introduction of the classic round-shaped Code 11:59 or its [Re]Master program that revives old designs from the 151-year-old brand’s archives.

Audemars Piguet was “not born in 1972,” says Sebastian Vivas, the venerable watchmaker’s heritage and museum director, referencing the year the Royal Oak debuted. “The Royal Oak is an absolute icon that we love and will continue to enrich and nurture, but AP is not only the Royal Oak—it’s much more than that.” Launching watches like the new Neo Frame Jumping Hour is meant to “develop the identity and enlarge the perception” of the brand as a whole.

The original inspiration came out of the house’s desire to make what’s known as a “jumping hours” watch. The defining quality is a dedicated aperture displaying the hours, which literally jump forward once the minute hand makes its full journey around the dial. This watch takes things a step further with its guichet-style dial that uses a pair of windows to display hours and minutes. Vivas and his team dreamed of developing a watch with this function when the house mapped out its plan for the [Re]Master program, but the model has since evolved to become a full-fledged piece of the permanent collection.

In their 1920s heyday, guichet-style watches were seen as a sign of modernity: a rejection of the typical timepiece in favor of one clad with an armored shell. Vivas walked me through a presentation, showing off the inspiration for the new iteration: quotidian objects like teapots, hair dryers, and irons from the ’20s transformed into sci-fi-ready props through the use of stacked edges, symmetrical shapes, and lots of gleaming metal. You can see those same accordion-like edges on Audemars Piguet’s Neo Frame Jumping Hour collection. The former gleaming gold alloy has been replaced with today’s idea of modernity: a shade the color of a black hole, created through a highly technical finishing process called physical vapor deposition.

Vivas told me that Audemars Piguet chose this watch because it was one of the house’s most interesting designs. The new model is inspired by a similar piece from 1929, although AP made a jumping hour wristwatch as early as 1924. How uncanny that, a century later, guichet-style watches are coming back into fashion. Cartier revived its archive version last year; other brands like Louis Vuitton, Bremont, and Jaeger-LeCoultre have joined in. As they did some 100 years ago, the watches seem to reject the traditional mode of time telling in exchange for something much more contemporary—stripping away everything but the necessary function and leaving only the brutalist hard-edged shape behind.

For AP, the watch represents a turn away from tradition on an even more symbolic level. The Neo Frame Jumping Hour leans in to an already iconic rectangular design that will be very familiar to many—a sturdy enough shape to stand up to the equally recognizable Royal Oak. For Vivas, these are watches that have been trapped in the urns of the AP museum he curates; now this bit of largely unknown history will be on collectors’ wrists.