The Royal Oak from Audemars Piguet is a timepiece you either love or hate at first sight. There is no in-between. However, there is also good news. In the last 17 years of being occupied with collecting watches, I noticed that this hate could also turn into love after a while. The Royal Oak seems to be a model that might need some experience in collecting watches. It is by no means an easy model to love, as the octagonal bezel and integrated bracelet are a bit unusual if you are only used to either round or rectangular watches.
For me personally, it was love at first sight. Although I didn’t know much about the Royal Oak and its historical models at first, I just loved the shape of the case and the integrated bracelet.
Audemars Piguet Royal Oak 15202ST Somewhere in the late 1990s, Audemars Piguet started to create catalogs that were numbered (1,2,3). It was a trilogy of catalogs that came out in 1998. In the first catalog, there was this testimonial of a Royal Oak owner. Bruno Rubinksy, owner of a department store in Paris, talked freely about his watch collecting since age 12 and how he met this cosmopolitan with an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak on his wrist. In this testimonial, he stated that he search long and hard for a similar watch and eventually found a pre-owned model in poor condition. He had it restored and it was made from scratch again.
After I read that testimonial (which is still one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in a catalog, instead of all th...