This is barely a watch at all, and that is entirely the point. The timepiece has almost vanished, swallowed up by a great cluster of brilliant-cut diamonds arranged around it like the petals of a flower, so that what sits on the wrist reads first as a jewel and only second as a way of telling the time. The name says it plainly: haute joaillerie, high jewelry, the very summit of the jeweler's art, the realm of grand diamond brooches and tiaras and necklaces made for the most important occasions. Here Audemars Piguet has brought that art to the wrist, and in doing so it has inverted the usual order of things, so that the watch serves the jewel rather than the jewel decorating the watch. This is a piece of high jewelry that happens to contain a watch, and it is dazzling.
The heart of the design is the cluster of diamonds surrounding the dial, and it speaks the oldest and grandest language of the jeweler. A ring of large round brilliant-cut diamonds encircles the small dial, each stone held in prongs and separated by tiny beads of gold, and they are arranged in a scalloped, blossoming form, like the petals of a flower opening around its center or the rays of a star. This kind of cluster, or entourage, setting is the classic vocabulary of high jewelry, the way a master jeweler frames a great stone in a brooch or a ring, and to see it translated onto a watch is to see the timepiece elevated into the company of the finest diamond jewels. Each large stone throws its own point of fire, and together they form a single brilliant blossom of light, substantial and important, the kind of ornament that catches every eye in a room.
At the center of that flower, where another watch would have a dial, sits a surface paved entirely with diamonds. There are no numerals and no markers, nothing to interrupt the sparkle; the dial is simply a field of small brilliant stones, snow-set so closely that the metal beneath disappears and the whole surface glitters as one, crossed only by slim hands and the maker's initials. The time is read off a bed of diamonds, and the effect is of looking into the center of the blossom and finding it, too, made entirely of light. It is the ultimate expression of the jeweler's idea that a watch dial is simply another surface to be covered in stones.
The bracelet continues the theme without pause, its links set with diamonds so that the brilliance flows unbroken from the cluster down around the wrist. The whole watch, from the case to the surrounding flower to the pavé dial to the bracelet, is white gold and diamonds from end to end, a single continuous river of light with no dark metal to break it, a bracelet of fire that happens to swell at one point into a diamond blossom holding a watch. To wear it is to wear a band of diamonds around the wrist, brilliant along its entire length.
It is worth remembering that this comes from Audemars Piguet, because it reveals a side of the house that its famous sports watch entirely obscures. For most of its long history, and still today, Audemars Piguet has been not only a watchmaker but a jeweler, and a watch like this demands the gem-setter's art as much as the watchmaker's: the selection and matching of the large diamonds, the precise hand-setting of each stone in its prongs, the snow-setting of the pavé, the assembly of a diamond bracelet, all of it the work of master jewelers working to the very highest standard. The haute joaillerie designation is reserved for the pinnacle of that art, and it means the watch was made with the same seriousness that goes into a great necklace or a fine brooch. Beneath the diamonds, a slim movement keeps the time quietly, asking nothing of its wearer but to enjoy the jewel.
At barely twenty-three millimeters the watch head is tiny, and yet the jewel is anything but discreet, because it was never meant to be. This is evening jewelry, a piece made to sparkle and to be seen, a diamond flower for the wrist that announces itself with the confidence of the grandest ornaments. Its smallness is only the watch's smallness; the jewel around it is generous and brilliant and proud.
That is what makes this watch so extraordinary. It is high jewelry first and a timepiece second, a great cluster of brilliant diamonds arranged like a blossom around a dial paved entirely in stones, carried on a diamond bracelet, the whole a continuous field of white fire from one of the great houses of watchmaking working as a master jeweler. It is a flower of diamonds that tells the time, and it wears its brilliance with complete, dazzling confidence.
