A perpetual calendar with a week indication is a rare thing, and this is where Code 11.59 carries one. Most perpetual calendars show the day, date, month, moon and leap year and stop there. Adding the week of the year means a further ring of information around a dial that is already the most crowded display in watchmaking, and very few manufacturers attempt it because there is nowhere left to put it. Audemars Piguet solves that by running the week indication around the outer edge of the dial, which is the only space a perpetual calendar leaves unused. The dial is blue aventurine, the case is white gold at 41 mm across and 10.9 mm thick, and it is no longer part of the current collection.
The case measures 41 mm across and 10.9 mm thick in white gold, and that thickness deserves attention, because it is thinner than the flyback chronographs in this same collection and barely two tenths of a millimetre above the time-and-date references. A perpetual calendar carrying six indications in a case under eleven millimetres is a genuinely slim watch, and it means the reference sits flat and passes under a cuff, which almost nothing carrying this complication manages. White gold reads as steel to anyone not handling it and declares itself only through weight, which suits a watch whose entire claim is on the dial. The dial is blue aventurine. Aventurine is glass with metallic particles suspended through it at varying depths, so it is not a colour applied to a surface but a material with real depth, shifting from near-black in shadow to a field of scattered light under direct illumination. Using it as the ground for a perpetual calendar is a considerable risk, because a calendar needs every subdial and aperture to stay readable and an iridescent surface is the hardest possible thing to read against. The applied hour markers and hands are white gold with a luminous treatment, cool against the blue and consistent with the case, and they are what keep the time itself findable on a dial doing so much else. The inner bezel is blue lacquer, which frames the aventurine without introducing a second material at the perimeter. The strap is blue rubber-coated with a white gold folding clasp, and the folding clasp rather than a pin buckle is worth registering, since most references in this collection use a buckle to keep height off the underside of a slim case. On a perpetual calendar the reasoning runs the other way. A calendar of this completeness is a watch its owner is strongly motivated never to let stop, since restarting it means resetting six indications rather than one, and a folding clasp keeps the strap in a closed loop so the watch is taken off and put on as a single movement rather than being opened out each time. That is a small thing on a simple watch and not a small thing on this one. It also spreads the weight of a precious metal case more evenly across the wrist.
The function set is a perpetual calendar with week indication, day, date, astronomical moon, month, leap year, hours and minutes. A perpetual calendar tracks the length of every month including February and accounts for leap years, so it requires no correction at all provided it is kept running, which is the whole point of the complication and also its principal demand. The astronomical moon is the more accurate form of the moon phase display, calculated against the actual lunar cycle rather than a simplified approximation, so it drifts by a negligible amount over a period measured in lifetimes. The week indication is the element that separates this reference from a conventional perpetual calendar, showing the week of the year on the outermost ring. The cost of all of this is the same cost every perpetual calendar carries: let the watch stop and resetting it is a careful and lengthy procedure rather than a quick one, and on a calendar this complete there is more to reset than usual.
Within Audemars Piguet's structure Code 11.59 was launched as a third pillar alongside the Royal Oak and the Royal Oak Offshore, and it is the only one of the three not built around an octagonal bezel and an integrated bracelet. Within the line the 26394 perpetual calendars sit at the top of the collection, above the 26393 chronographs and well above the 15210 selfwinding models, and they are the references that establish Code 11.59 as a serious complication platform rather than only a design exercise. Its direct sibling is the same watch in rose gold, which uses aventurine for the subdials as well and reads considerably warmer as a result. Between the two, the white gold version is the cooler and more restrained, letting the aventurine be the only thing on the watch with any colour in it.
This reference suits a collector who wants the most complete calendar available and refuses to accept a thick watch to get it. That is a specific brief and there are very few answers to it anywhere in the industry. The aventurine dial is what will decide the purchase, since the material cannot be photographed convincingly and only makes sense in person under moving light, where it reads as a night sky rather than as a blue dial. Anyone judging the reference from images is judging something considerably duller. Now that it has left the catalogue the production is closed, and perpetual calendars are made in far smaller numbers than any other reference in the collection. The buyer is someone who wants a complication they will never have to correct, in a watch they can actually wear.
