Audemars Piguet Made Serena Williams a White Ceramic Royal Oak

Audemars Piguet has released the Royal Oak Selfwinding Chronograph Serena Williams, a 38mm chronograph in white ceramic with a pink mother-of-pearl dial, limited to 500 pieces at 70,000 Swiss francs. Williams has been an ambassador for more than a decade and this is the first watch she has worked on herself.

Two things here deserve more attention than the colour scheme, and the first is the material.

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White Ceramic Is the Difficult One

Ceramic in watchmaking is zirconium oxide powder mixed with a binder, pressed into shape, then fired at around 1,400 degrees, at which point it shrinks by roughly a quarter and comes out harder than hardened steel. Nothing in daily life scratches it. The colour goes all the way through the material, so it cannot wear off.

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Getting it white is the hard part. Black ceramic forgives a lot, since pigment hides small inconsistencies in the mix and any variation between batches disappears into the darkness. White shows everything. A slightly uneven blend, a trace of contamination, a firing that ran a few degrees off, and you get a component that reads as cream next to one that reads as white, which is useless when you are building a bracelet from dozens of links that all have to match.

 

Then you have to machine it. Ceramic is too hard for normal tooling, so every surface has to be ground and polished with diamond, and the Royal Oak is a case with alternating brushed and polished surfaces and sharp defined edges. Doing that in steel is already skilled work. Doing it in a material that chips when you push it too hard, across a full case and an integrated bracelet, is why AP ceramic watches cost what they do and why the brand has released them slowly.

 

The honest warning is that hardness and toughness are different properties. This watch will never scratch and it will chip if you catch a corner hard against a door frame, and a chipped ceramic link cannot be polished out. It gets replaced.

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The Movement Is New

Inside is the calibre 6401, which replaces the 2385 that powered AP's smaller chronographs for nearly thirty years. The old movement was based on an outside design from Frédéric Piguet, so this is Audemars Piguet putting its own integrated chronograph into the compact Royal Oak for the first time.

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Integrated means the chronograph was designed as part of the movement instead of being added as a module on top, which keeps the watch thinner and puts the pushers where they feel right. It has a column wheel, which is the traditional and more expensive way of controlling the start, stop and reset sequence, and a patented vertical clutch, which engages the chronograph through friction plates pressed together instead of through meshing teeth. The practical difference is that the seconds hand starts without the small jump you see on older chronographs, and the watch can run with the chronograph engaged all day without wearing anything out.

 

Power reserve is 55 hours, and the rotor is 22 carat pink gold, visible through a sapphire back.

Why AP Keeps Doing This and Others Do Not

The second thing worth noting is the business behind the watch, because Audemars Piguet has been much better at this than its competitors and the reason is simple.

 

Most brands approach women's watches by taking a men's model, making it smaller, and adding diamonds around the bezel. The design conversation happens entirely among men, and the result is a watch aimed at whoever might buy it as a gift.

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AP has spent years building products with women for women who buy their own watches, which is the fastest growing group in luxury watches and the one the industry has been slowest to take seriously. That means accepting pink and mother-of-pearl as legitimate choices instead of treating grey and 36mm as the only respectable path to being taken seriously.

 

Williams picked the combination deliberately, pairing a material that reads as tough with a dial that reads as soft, and she has been making that argument in public since she turned up at the US Open in a catsuit with a diamond bracelet.

The Money

Seventy thousand francs is strong pricing for a 38mm steel-sized chronograph, and ceramic explains part of it while the name explains the rest. Signature editions have a mixed record afterwards, since the association that makes a watch desirable now can narrow the buyer pool later, and 500 pieces is a lot for a watch this specific.

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What makes this one more interesting than the usual celebrity tie-up is that the watch would stand on its own with the name removed. A full white ceramic Royal Oak chronograph with a new in-house movement is a serious object. The pink dial is the part Williams brought, and it is also the part that will decide whether you want it.