Birthday Honours — Audemars Piguet Celebrate Five Years Of The CODE 11.59
To celebrate five years of the CODE 11.59, Audemars Piguet have unveiled several daring additions to the pioneering range. They are a lavish reward for patient admirers.
Contrariness can be a wonderful innovator. The greatest romantic novels — Shelley’s Frankenstein, Austen’s best-known bouts of barbed gentility, the Sunday-night screen adaptation fare of Hugo and Tolstoy — always raised a middle finger to the formal austerity of Enlightenment ideals; impressionism was a tetchily daubed reaction to the craven verisimilitude of realism; punk was a rebellion against, well, everything except youthful nihilism. ‘Épater la bourgeoisie’ would have been a pretty insipid rallying cry without bourgeois values for those French Decadent poets to rail against.
When childhood friends Jules Louis Audemars and Edward Auguste Piguet united to form a company that, by the time of its 150th anniversary next year, will have become the most decorated by the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève of horology’s Holy Trinity (which includes Rolex and Patek Philippe), they did so to militate against the soulless tenets of industrialisation and mass-market distribution.
The driving force behind this quest was the handcrafting of uniquely complicated timepieces: hence, in the first half of its history, the manufacturer created the world’s first-minute repeater watch (1892); an ultra-complicated pocket-watch in the form of the Universelle (1899), which offered a minute repeater, alarm, perpetual calendar, deadbeat seconds, chronograph and split-seconds hand; the first skeletonised pocket-piece (1934); and Calibre 9ML, an ultra-slim (1.64mm) piece, as early as 1938.
Elsewhere, with standardised parts democratising access to mechanical timepieces, Audemars Piguet, boosted intermittently by the above achievements, were surfing elegantly over the tide of quotidian banality that followed the war. And then the manufacture — and all of its brethren in the world of mechanical watchmaking — hit a tsunami that was flowing the other way.
Without the nonconformist chutzpah of the eponymous founders, this line of watches would not exist.
Readers of this publication are too well-versed in the whys and wherefores of post-war horology to require an in-depth explanation of Audemars Piguet’s incredible response to the quartz crisis. Suffice to say, however, that a gentleman by the name of Gérald Genta pulled the most fruitful all-nighter in history just before what was then called the Swiss Watch Show, resulting in an all-steel sports watch, the Royal Oak, that changed the industry forever.
If CODE 11.59 by Audemars Piguet were an instalment in the most famous space-opera franchise of all time, the above text would be formatted in yellow sans-serif type, pitched at a sharp angle, and floating into an inky void. Because without all of this narrative backdrop — without the nonconformist chutzpah of the eponymous founders; the devotion to evolutionary leaps and bounds throughout its narrative; the audacious breakaway goal when the match seemed unwinnable — the line of watches gracing these pages and now celebrating its fifth anniversary would not exist. “Classic by nature and unconventional by design, CODE 11.59 by Audemars Piguet chooses it all,” is how François- Henry Bennahmias — the manufacture’s Chief Executive Officer at the time of the unveiling of these 13 references across six different models (three with new in-house movements) — put it. “This collection demanded new tools, skills and techniques to reach an exceptional degree of technical and aesthetic complexity... It tells the passionate stories of the dedicated watchmakers who dared to follow their convictions, joined forces and persevered, always pushing their own limits.”
Specifically, talking points included the way designers had wittily alloyed hints of the Royal Oak’s octagon majesty, around the middle of the case, with the tenets of classic round watchmaking in the pieces’ multifaceted architecture; the way the openworked lugs were welded to the bezel; the markedly genderless aesthetics of its 41mm diameter dial; and, perhaps most of all, the double-curved, domed, glare-proof sapphire crystal that enhanced legibility while adding a certain theatricality to the dial from different angles. Oh, and there was the technical prowess of six new movements, including a perpetual calendar, Supersonnerie repeater, and automatic and selfwinding three-register chronograph.
While many self-appointed social media jurors gleefully expressed their indifference, particularly to the time-only iterations, shrewder observers noted that what Audemars Piguet had created was a microcosm of its innovative past as well as the perfect vehicle for future innovations. Justifying the acronymic part of the line’s name — ‘Challenge, Own, Dare, Evolve’ — since the 2019 launch we’ve had, as well as new case sizes, two-tone versions in 18-carat white- and rose-gold; fumé dials in deep red, purple and grey; an openworked version whose bridges were in retina-searing blue, thanks to an Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) treatment; and a piece whose Starwheel complication nods to a request from a 17th- century insomniac pope.
The seven new CODE 11.59 by Audemars Piguet selfwinding and selfwinding chronograph iterations released to celebrate the anniversary — all in 18-carat pink-gold cases — are the most lavish reward yet for patient spectators who find the long game more entertaining. “These new models follow the different evolutions the collection has seen in 2023,” the Audemars Piguet Product Director, Sofia Candeias, says. “In addition to the new signature decoration now appearing on certain 41mm gold models, the 38mm line has been enriched with new references and original colours, enabling the CODE 11.59 by Audemars Piguet to be worn on all types of wrists, illustrating its extreme versatility as well as its contemporary spirit.”
A proudly less sober aesthetic has also been ushered in, with the help of the Swiss guilloché craftsman Yann von Kaenel.
A proudly less sober aesthetic has also been ushered in, with the help of the Swiss guilloché craftsman Yann von Kaenel, who created the dye used in the embossed dial pattern of concentric circles. A galvanic process called Physical Vapour Deposition was then used to preserve and enhance the resulting contours, an effect that works in tandem with that sapphire dial to create an appearance like ripples on the surface of water.
New elongated, flattened, facetted and polished 18-carat pink-gold hour markers and tweaks to the typography of the seconds scale, the shape of the crown and the signature buckle are also eye- catching, evolutionary steps. The five-year anniversary of CODE 11.59 by Audemars Piguet deserves its salience, its fanfare, because it essentially marks the arrival of the ‘tomorrow’ to which the numeric part of its moniker alludes. If Jules Louis Audemars and Edward Auguste Piguet, hatching their audacious game plan in 1868 Le Brassus, was the chemical reaction in the primordial soup, the arrival of CODE 11.59 by Audemars Piguet was the Cambrian explosion a few billion years later. It was also — as some recognised it at the time — a mere teaser of incredible things to come. In life, an English proverb has it that ‘good things come to those who wait’. In horology, a more apposite adaptation would be, ‘Great things keep on coming to those who keep on waiting’.
Digital Technician: Derrick Kakembo
Grooming: Grace Hatcher using Augustinus Bader
Fashion Assistant: Helly Pringle
Models: Tommy Dunn and Patrick O'Donnell at Select
Location: C/O JJ Locations
