Officially, it’s the year of ‘shaping materials’ for the Swiss luxury watchmaker Audemars Piguet. That much is clear in the brand’s latest, most exciting projects. There are new watches, to be sure.
But more interestingly, Audemars Piguet has just staged an immersive exhibition in Milan that’s open to the public. In the Shaping Materials exhibition, a series of themed rooms covers the story of how the manufacture transforms raw materials into finished components. It opens, for example, in a room with hunks of simulated gold, steel, platinum and ceramic that can be placed on a pedestal to activate an audiovisual experience that evinces the qualities of each material.
There’s also a legitimate chunk of iron from Switzerland’s Vallée de Joux, meant to represent the origins of metallurgy in the cradle of high-end watchmaking. The idea is that Audemars Piguet’s fundamental strength is its creativity with materials. Noble metals such as gold and platinum have an intrinsic preciousness to them, but take it from the manufacture that created the Royal Oak—the first luxury steel watch—to imbue materials such as steel, titanium, carbon and ceramic with fineness through craftsmanship.
Some of the brand’s most exciting achievements of late are in the material realm. There is the new sand gold alloy, a beautiful shade that straddles pink and white gold. There’s also a duet of gold and ceramic mélanges announced by the brand’s R&D labs.
Dubbed chroma gold and c.