With leap day just behind us, it’s turning into the year of the perpetual calendar; Audemars Piguet unveiled a particularly special one co-designed with musician, seasoned watch collector, and longtime friend of the brand John Mayer.
The model marks both the end of an era and a new beginning. The Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar “John Mayer” Limited Edition will be the brand’s final limited edition to house the caliber 5134 movement but offers a newly reimagined design that fittingly features a celestial aesthetic inspired by the night sky.
For the new collaboration, AP brings its technical prowess while harnessing Mayer’s creative edge to infuse a new perspective into the iconic model. The singer provides a unique vantage point, combining his innate artistic eye with his taste for precision and personal fascination with the art of watchmaking. The result of these collective forces is a watch that retains the hallmarks of the Royal Oak that have contributed to its enduring legacy with a fresh, highly contemporary design language.
Dials are having a major moment in watchmaking and have long been an area of interest for Mayer, so the attention to detail in the dial’s creation was of utmost importance. Here, the rich blue dial is the natural showpiece of the model with a meticulously conceived “Crystal Sky” concept inspired by the cosmos. This design was created in a deep-blue shade using Physical Vapour Deposition (PVD), which both preserves and enhances the depth of the pattern and maximizes the play of light. The embossed motif is composed of irregular shapes resembling crystals, whose sharp angles and facets add texture and depth.
“My favourite watches have dials that you can stare at endlessly,” confesses Mayer. “A great watch dial feels like a picture window—you look into it, not at it. In the case of this QP, it’s like looking up at a moonless sky. There is a true sense of nature in it. And when you couple that sense of depth and vastness with the complication of a perpetual calendar, it is a very powerful combination of technical prowess and aesthetic design.”
Conceiving the perfect dial goes beyond aesthetics and down to technical elements like legibility as well. Here, Mayer proposed some subtle modifications to the perpetual calendar display. For instance, the number “31” of the date subdial is usually red on modern Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar models, but here it has been printed in white. In addition, the two numerals of the “31” are now smaller in size and slightly stepped to distinguish them from the adjacent “1.” Lastly, Mayer chose a light-blue colour for the week indicator that “could fall back into the dial when simply reading the time but easily be found when looking to read the week complication,” as he explains.
Inside, the Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar “John Mayer” Limited Edition is equally special, marking the end of an era for AP’s caliber 5134 movements. The watchmaker’s history of perpetual calendar movements dates back to 1967 with the caliber 2120/2800, which was housed in the thinnest self-winding perpetual calendar wristwatch of its time. In the decades to come, AP would continue to evolve its line of perpetual calendars, culminating in the creation of the caliber 5134 in 2015.
“The Caliber 5134 will go down in history as one that defined an era of watch collecting—and public enthusiasm at large—for a complication that had not enjoyed that kind of attention and desire before,” observes Mayer. “The perpetual calendar is, for me, the ultimate complication, the benchmark for high horology, and though there are complications that are more complex, the historical footing of the QP in the history of watchmaking is what makes it stand out.”
Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar “John Mayer” Limited Edition is available today in a run of just 200 pieces, priced at RM850,000.
