Audemars Piguet
Revolution Awards 2017: Best Women’s Watch — Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Frosted Gold
Audemars Piguet
Revolution Awards 2017: Best Women’s Watch — Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Frosted Gold
But to be fair, the gold-cased Audemars Piguet Royal Oak that has received the Carolina Bucci “hammered” treatment is a piece so exquisitely beautiful that no man could be blamed for giving in to his feminine side. With a faint reminiscence of the great Andrew Grima — particularly in his Hammered Gold LED watch for Pulsar in the mid-1970s — the case was delicately pitted to create a shimmering mirage giving the impression, from a distance, of hundreds of tiny diamonds.
A signature of Bucci’s work is the “Florentine finish,” which has given the Royal Oak Frosted Gold its shimmering, stippled effect through blasting indentations into the gold with a diamond-tipped high-pressure drill. The difficulty in applying the finish was achieving a uniform effect that did not detract from the fluidity of the Royal Oak lines, and only after many months of trial and error between the two centers of craftsmanship was the desired balance between texture and sparkle achieved.
Already available in rose and white gold, we eagerly await the introduction of a yellow gold version. And for all those men who remember the old advertising slogan: “Ladies, you ride our Harleys, smoke our Havanas, drink our Glenmorangie. Hands off our IWC,” we say: “Touché!”