John Mayer & Audemars Piguet Collab On Limited Edition Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar Watch
Mayer’s $180,000 Royal Oak collab features a dial inspired by his surrealist “vision of a crystal sky.”
John Mayer’s G-Shock collabs were cool, wearable homages to the digital instruments on which the virtuosic guitarist and singer-songwriter wrote his first tunes. But as a seasoned watch collector (and brand ambassador for Audemars Piguet), a higher-end Mayer-approved timepiece is also in order.
Enter the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar “John Mayer” Limited Edition. Mayer worked one-on-one with AP on the design, which features an 18K white gold 41mm case, bracelet, hour markers and signature Royal Oak hands.
The dial is the star of show, featuring a dark blue “Crystal Sand” pattern made up of irregular crystal shapes—Mayer selected this motif to invoke a surrealist “vision of a crystal sky.” The brand notes that the crystals’ stamping die was “created atom by atom through a metal deposition process known as electroforming.”
According to Robb Report, Mayer suggested a few extra tweaks to make it truly his. The number “31” on the date subdial was slightly downsized to distinguish it from the adjacent “1” and rendered in white instead of red.
The week indicator also appears in a light-blue color that “could fall back into the dial when simply reading the time but [is] easily be found when looking to read the week complication,” Mayer said in a statement.
“My favorite watches have dials that you can stare endlessly at. A great watch dial feels like a picture window—you look into it, not at it,” Mayer continued. “In the case of this [perpetual calendar], 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.”
Power comes from the self-winding Calibre 5134—AP’s final implementation of the 40-hour movement in a limited-edition timepiece—allowing it to display the week, day, date, moon cycle, month, hours, minutes and leap year.
Only 200 examples of the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar “John Mayer” Limited Edition will be produced and sold for $180,700 each.
If it’s an even more upscale Royal Oak you’re after, Audemars Piguet also just released a “sand gold” edition of its Royal Oak Selfwinding Flying Tourbillon Openworked. The case and bracelet are crafted from a combination of 18K white and pink gold, creating the unique hue for which its named.
Meanwhile its skeletonized dial flaunts the intensely intricate Calibre 2972, which combines a self-winding mechanism with a flying tourbillon, warranting the $285,000-plus price tag reported by Monochrome.