Audemars Piguet-Matthew Williams Royal Oak
In horolog y circles, the phrase ‘grail watch’ refers to a highly coveted piece that an individual, for all their contacts and means, has not managed to acquire — thus far. Not so for Matthew Williams. For the Chicago-born designer and founder of 1017 ALYX 9SM (and the Creative Director of Givenchy women’s and men’s collections), a grail watch always simply meant his next watch. Then the next one. And so on, and so on, until he’d completed a journey that began with his father gifting him a $1,000 piece on his completion of high school, right up to his acquisition of the holiest of grails: an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak.
So it’s difficult to express how big an honour – and a deserved one — it was for Williams to have been asked to co-create four new Royal Oak and Royal Oak Offshore references and a Royal Oak unique piece (a 41mm self-winding chronograph with two-tone
