‘Unisex’ might be today’s buzzword in the watch industry, but it was a different story at Audemars Piguet in 1989, when the Managing Director, Stephen Urquhart, tasked a 22-year-old designer called Emmanuel Gueit with secretly revamping the Royal Oak ahead of its 20th birthday. The steel sports watch created in 1972 by Gérald Genta had by then become a cornerstone of the Audemars Piguet line-up and been endowed with ‘sacred’ status, so anyone who tinkered with it would do so at their potential peril.
But once Gueit grasped the nettle, he found himself inspired in part by the
