What does it take to make a great watch? Time helps, obviously: whether that’s the few minutes it took to design the Patek Philippe Nautilus or the harried years-long race between Heuer and Zenith to create the first automatic chronograph. The creation of Alyx’s new sleek-as-the-underside-of-a-CD Audemars Piguet Royal Oak began, for designer Matthew Williams, at birth. Consider the designer’s full name: Matthew Michael Williams, the middle name a nod to his godfather, a watch dealer who got him interested in timepieces when most kids were hunting Beanie Babies and Pokemon cards. Decades later, in Williams’s 20s, he’d spot his dream watch: “Kanye had one when I first met him,” he tells me over the phone from Italy, referring to the brand’s legendary Royal Oak. “The rose-gold one...it was 2006 or 2007, and he was the first person to have one that I ever saw.”
More time elapsed: “[It] took a long time to save up to be able to get the one I always wanted,” Williams says. So, almost 10 years after admiring Kanye’s wrist, Williams purchased a vintage Royal Oak originally released in the ‘90s for himself, and has worn it regularly since. The last piece of inspiration came after another interval, during a dinner with the celebrity tattoo artist Dr. Woo, who was wearing a piece customized by Mad Paris, which reliably takes grail watches and turns them matte black through a chemical process. Williams enlisted Mad to make blacked-out Royal Oaks for friends and family. A little more time elapsed, and he decided to go wider, deciding to make a 41-millimeter edition in brushed steel available to customers. Alyx will make 40 pieces in total before cutting off supply. The watch costs $47,995, according to a stockist. “They're not gonna all sell tomorrow,” Williams acknowledges. “They're probably gonna sell over the next few years.” The entire process took a year.
Why retool a classic? “A lot of Alyx is really just based on my taste,” Williams says. “We work with brands that I buy on my own or I wear, so it really was just because that was the watch I've had. It was as simple as that.”
The watch is unmistakably an Alyx production, as natural a fit on the brand’s runway as its metal belts and bags. Most of the time spent creating the watch was devoted to working with Alyx’s metal suppliers to make a bracelet with the brand’s signature roller-coaster buckle. There was a ton of fiddling involved in making sure the buckle was secure and that the bracelet would lay flat. “[The buckle’s] so small, so it was just like really minute measurements we had to had to get right,” Williams says.
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