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Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak Concept Tourbillon Spider-Man is a feat of openwork

The stunning design meshes elegance and whimsy in a unique timepiece that celebrates the airy beauty of openwork

 Photo: Audemars Piguet

Anne-Gaëlle Quinet, Head of Complications at the esteemed watchmaker Audemars Piguet, sits in front of me with a small unassuming gray pouch. She starts to explain the 50-hour process needed to create each of the 250, limited edition timepieces, one of which sits in the pouch, when she decides it’s probably best to just show me.

Out comes the Royal Oak Concept Tourbillon “Spider-Man”. The 42 mm titanium case is contrasted with a black ceramic bezel and crown in an elegant display, but the true hero is the openwork. The maximum amount of material has been removed, such that Spider-Man appears to be suspended as though in mid-air, leaping out with an incredible 3-dimensional effect while striking his signature web-slinging pose.

The openwork required all of the expertise on-hand at Audemars Piguet. “If you look at the historical background, openwork has always been part of our DNA,” Quinet says. “You have different kinds of openwork movement. Either you start the movement without many elements around, or it’s a full close movement, and then you open it by hand-drilling the interior part/material of the bridges.” In this case, it was designed to eliminate as much material as possible.

The iconic character comes to life using 100 grams of white gold, which are painstakingly cut down to around 4 grams. Starting with a CNC machine, the silhouette and volume of the character are cut. Then the lower half of the costume is laser-engraved to give it the appearance of textile – a feat which require many tests to perfect, Quinet says.

“We have this traditional way to do complications,” she adds. “But for the Marvel piece, we have combined ancestral expertise with futuristic technology.”

Once this is complete, the top of the character is hand-engraved, and all of the details across Spider-Man’s body are hand-engraved. The hand-engraving alone takes around 30 hours of work, and because it is the product of a single artisan, each piece is unique.

Spider-Man is then painted with his signature red and blue colors, with special emphasis on shading to further accentuate the hand-engraved details, musculature, and to cement the 3-dimensional impact of the character.

“It has been built around the character, that’s why you have these vertical movements to give more space to the character,” Quinet says, pointing towards the center of the watch. “And when you look at the bridges, you will see the hand finishing details in titanium, but they have also like a greyish aspect.”

Attention to detail is on full display with this piece. The dial is crafted with alternating black PVD-coated gold hour markers and Arabic numbers overlaid by hands of the same material. These are then enhance with white luminescence which turns blue in the dark. The case alternates between polished and micro-blasted finishes on the top and bottom, with satin-finished sides. The movement features everything from traits-tirés to sandblasting and polishing.

It’s a comfortable mix between the traditions of watch-making and the whimsy of the comic book world, bringing elegance to the flash and excitement of Spider-Man. But there is also something new about this model – the interchangeable wrist strap, allowing the wearer to swap from a black and grey rubber strap to a black and red rubber strap, in keeping with the superhero’s costume. This is the first time that the 42mm Royal Oak Concept is equipped with an interchangeable strap, and it is impressively quick and easy to snap one strap off, and to snap another one on.

This is the latest in Audemars Piguet’s partnership with Marvel, which saw the release of the Royal Oak Concept Flying Tourbillon “Black Panther” in 2021. Just like the inaugural Marvel-themed watch, a unique piece accompanies the limited edition – the Royal Oak Concept Tourbillon “Black Suit Spider-Man”, an ode to the signature black Symbiote suit worn by the hero in The Amazing Spider-Man 252 in 1984. In the unique piece, Spider-Man appears on the dial in a black suit.

“The unique piece is made of a white gold case with tremendous work on the hand-finishing with different textures across no less than 3 layers,” Quinet points out. “The first layer is engraved and represents the legs of the Spider-Man symbol, where we have filled a new hybrid ceramic paste that glows green in the dark.”

This is accompanied by a black ceramic bezel with ceramic also enveloping the case back, which reads “Royal Oak Concept Unique Piece” in white. The Unique Piece is auctioned off, with the funds going to support Audemars Piguet’s two partner non-profit organizations, First Book and Ashoka, which provide educational programs for low-income youth. “It’s really important to help and empower people,” Quinet says. “With this new launch there is also a hero aspect behind it, especially with Spider-Man: With great power, comes great responsibility.”

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