The most famous surface in modern watchmaking is missing from this watch, and that absence is the entire point. Ask anyone to picture a Royal Oak and they will see the Grande Tapisserie dial, that intricate hand-guilloché waffle of tiny raised squares that has been the model's signature since Gérald Genta drew it in 1972, the texture as instantly recognizable as the octagonal bezel and the eight hexagonal screws. It is the face the Royal Oak is known by. And on this Jumbo Extra-Thin Openworked, Audemars Piguet has simply removed it, cut the dial away entirely, and left you looking straight through the watch at the mechanism inside. For a watch so defined by a single iconic surface to appear with that surface gone is a genuinely audacious move, a kind of confidence that says the Royal Oak no longer needs its most famous feature to be a Royal Oak. What it offers instead is arguably more intimate: the naked truth of what makes the watch run.
Openworking, or skeletonization, looks like subtraction but is in fact one of the most additive forms of labor in all of watchmaking. To create this view, a watchmaker takes the bridges and mainplate of a finished movement and cuts away every scrap of metal not strictly required to hold the mechanism together, paring the structure down to a lace of gold that still has to bear the loads and tolerances of a working caliber. That alone is exacting, but the real labor comes afterward. Every one of the newly exposed edges, and a skeletonized movement has an enormous number of them, must then be hand-beveled and polished, the internal angles filed by hand to a mirror sheen, a task that on a solid movement would apply to a handful of bridges and here multiplies across a whole filigree of tiny struts and openings. The result you see through the front of this watch, a golden web of bridges and wheels and jewels catching light from a hundred hand-finished facets, represents vastly more work than the closed movement of an ordinary Royal Oak, not less. The emptiness is the craft.
What that openwork reveals is itself a landmark, and this is a detail only a knowledgeable eye will register. For fifty years, the extra-thin Jumbo was powered by the calibre 2121, a movement with roots reaching back to the 1960s that had become one of the most storied automatic calibers in the industry. In 2022, marking the Royal Oak's fiftieth anniversary, Audemars Piguet finally retired it and introduced an entirely new in-house replacement, and this reference carries the openworked expression of that new generation, the calibre 7124. It is a thoroughly modern movement, beating at a contemporary four hertz where the old caliber ran slower, and holding a generous reserve of well over two days where the old one managed appreciably less, wound by a slim openworked oscillating weight in gold that sweeps across the mechanism. To skeletonize a brand-new caliber and put it on display is to invite scrutiny of the very thing the brand spent years developing, and the openworked Jumbo does exactly that, turning a generational engineering change into something you can watch turning on your wrist. The movement remains remarkably thin, which is what allows the whole watch to stand just over eight millimeters tall, preserving the wafer-like profile that made the original so revolutionary.
That thinness is the heart of the Jumbo's identity, and it is worth remembering why the nickname exists. When the Royal Oak launched in 1972 at thirty-nine millimeters, that diameter was so large for a luxury watch of the era that the piece was called the Jumbo, even though by modern standards thirty-nine millimeters is elegantly moderate. The name stuck, and today it denotes not size but lineage: the Jumbo Extra-Thin is the truest living descendant of Genta's original, carrying the same proportions, the same integrated bracelet flowing seamlessly out of the case with no lugs, the same tapered links, and the same octagonal bezel secured by eight hexagonal screws, here rendered in contrasting white gold against the warm case. It is the Royal Oak in its purest and most historically faithful form, and choosing to openwork this particular reference, rather than one of the larger or more overtly modern models, is a deliberate act of placing the boldest gesture on the most sacred canvas.
The choice of yellow gold deepens that sense of return. For years the Royal Oak was seen almost exclusively in steel, white gold, or rose, and yellow gold had fallen out of fashion, associated with an earlier era. Then, around the fiftieth anniversary, Audemars Piguet brought it back, reviving the warm, unapologetic yellow gold that clothed so many Royal Oaks in the 1970s and 1980s, and doing so as a knowing nod to the model's own history. In full yellow gold, case and bracelet alike, with a movement finished in matching warm gold tones behind white gold markers and the faceted Royal Oak hands, this watch is a piece of deliberate nostalgia executed with total modernity. It looks back to the decade of its birth while showing off a movement that did not exist until half a century later, and the two impulses, heritage and innovation, sit together without any friction at all.
That reconciliation is what makes the openworked Jumbo such a complete object. It takes the most recognizable luxury sports watch ever designed and performs on it the one gesture that seems most contrary to its nature, stripping away the tapisserie dial that made it famous, and in doing so reveals that the Royal Oak was never really about that dial at all but about proportion, finish, and the quality of what lies beneath. It honors Genta's fifty-year-old design down to the last screw while displaying a movement that finally replaced the caliber of his era. And it wraps the whole statement in the warm gold of the decade that started it. This is the Royal Oak turned inside out, confident enough to show its skeleton in place of its face, opulent enough to do it entirely in yellow gold, and honest enough to let you watch the mechanism that has always been the real reason the watch matters.
