2024 was quite the year for Audemars Piguet. In another 12 months of milestones, the elite luxury watchmaker  scooped the top prize at the GPHG awards, “broke the internet” by collaborating with the world’s best-selling hip-hop artist Travis Scott, and then trailed a succession story that saw a showman chief executive bow out to be replaced by a female boss (the only one among Switzerland’s top 10 watch companies, shockingly), culminating in record revenues of 2.35 billion Swiss francs. One wonders what heights there are left to scale for the family-owned company – just how much bigger can the AP story get?

As it is, AP’s next big thing is the smallest wristwatch the Swiss giant has made in more than a quarter of a century. The Royal Oak Mini is a quartz watch that shares the brawny octagonal silhouette of Gérald Genta’s icon, only shrunk to dinky toy size. Measured across, it’s just 23mm.

Despite those elfin proportions, few with an interest in watches will fail to clock this mini Oak. Some will seize on it as a creative and cultural masterstroke, while others will question whether it’s true to the spirit of the “Jumbo”, as the original 39mm Royal Oak of 1972 is fondly known; or, whether a quartz watch deserves its place in Audemars Piguet’s canon, which was defined last year by the spectacular Universelle RD#4, an astonishing super-complication with 40 functions that lit up the GPHG.

There will be other flash points, too. Is the Mini Oak a women’s watch, for one, or is it a new flag-bearer for the small men’s watch trend? And in any case, wouldn’t that make it unisex? Why do this now? Not many watches released this year will outmuscle the bijou Mini Oak for social, cultural and watchmaking cachet. For such a small watch, it shoulders a lot.

As I come to assess it, it is still some weeks until the Mini Oak will be ushered out of Le Brassus and into the mosh pit of modern media, and so gauging the watcherati’s response is not yet possible. But even without the inevitable barrage of social posts showing Kendrick Lamar-like celebrities sitting court-side wearing it that you may by now have seen, I’m confident in this forecast: the Mini Oak will fly.

Before then, some background. It may surprise some, but this is not the first pint-sized Royal Oak. At 39mm, Gérald Genta’s original 5402ST of 1972 was considered too bulky for the female wrist, and so Audemars Piguet’s design director Jacqueline Dimier (a graphic designer who had been recruited from Rolex in the mid-1970s) was tasked with creating a Royal Oak for women. Reducing it down was a tall order, as Dimier would later explain. “The eight hexagonal screws running through the entire case are a major constraint because they directly influence the proportions of the bezel and, consequently, the entire aesthetic balance of the watch,” she said. She also had to incorporate a mechanical movement that measured 15.4mm across, placing further tension on the design. But when Dimier’s 29mm version arrived in 1976 – the Royal Oak II, as it is sometimes known – the watch created a new paradigm.

While that watch remains the smallest mechanical Royal Oak ever made, Audemars Piguet would cinch the design further still into the 1980s as it entertained battery-powered quartz movements. One of the many advantages of quartz calibres was that they could be shrunk down without sacrificing accuracy, the curse of smaller mechanical movements. The Royal Oak would be taken down to 26mm and then again to 24.5mm, before in 1997 Audemars Piguet introduced what would be formalised as the Royal Oak Mini.

The smallest Royal Oak ever made was only slightly wider than a penny at 20mm in diameter, a tiny jewel of a thing on a metal bracelet powered by Jaeger-LeCoultre’s 11.5mm-wide Calibre 2601. It was cute but, in keeping with the mood of the time, it also radiated a certain Spice Girl sass. Just as importantly, it retained the balance of larger pieces in the Royal Oak line. Dimier was almost certainly involved in its development, as was designer Emmanuel Gueit, but the original drawing is unsigned.

The Mini Oak would arrive in the Royal Oak’s 25th birthday year, which – as AP cognoscenti will recognise – was also the year of the first Royal Oak Tourbillon, the first Royal Oak Chronograph and the first Royal Oak Grande Complication, which at 44mm in diameter was, and remains, the largest Royal Oak ever made (ignoring the Offshore, of course). While those models trumpeted AP’s mechanical prowess, the Mini Oak reinforced the brand’s reputation for playful experimentation and confirmed its understanding of the proportions and preoccupations of its female clientele.

The larger-scale Royal Oak designs would catapult Audemars Piguet forward (in 1997, the Royal Oak made up just 45 per cent of sales but would eventually soar to over 90 per cent), but the Mini Oak would live out a much shorter lifespan. Audemars Piguet’s records show that while it made 26 versions of it, they all came between 1997 and 1999. The total run amounted to 1965 documented examples, with 23 models produced either in volumes of single figures or as piece-unique (heavily gem-set, secret watches, and so on).

Then – as quickly as it had arrived – the Mini Oak disappeared.

Not quite three decades on, many Royal Oak fans will therefore be new to the Royal Oak Mini. Just as alien: the concept of a quartz Royal Oak. Yet here we are, presented with a watch that is mini, quartz and still instantly recognisable as a Royal Oak.

The Royal Oak Mini’s 23mm case and bracelet are in either yellow, pink or white gold, and inside is Calibre 2730, a new movement developed for Audemars Piguet by an unnamed third party, and the unit that dictates the case’s novel 23mm diameter. As quartz goes, this is pretty high-level, programmed to advance the hour and minute hands only once every 20 seconds in a bid to deliver greater efficiency. This trick, says AP, is imperceptible to the human eye, but ensures the watch will run for seven years before it needs a new battery. Further efficiency comes from an on/off “switch”, activated by pulling and pushing the crown.

Each case and bracelet is finished with the brand’s “Frosted Gold” decoration using a mediaeval hammering technique developed with the Florentine jeweller Carolina Bucci (first introduced by Audemars Piguet in 2016), that lends precious metal a twinkling diamond effect. Beyond, there’s the familiar Petite Tapisserie dial pattern, applied hour markers in all 12 positions, and a logo in full, rather than the “AP” at 12 seen on the previous Mini Oak (and, indeed, on Dimier’s 1976 confection).

Out of these various ingredients, some salient questions remain. That is: is the Royal Oak Mini a woman’s watch? Why quartz? And why make it now?

Speaking from his office in the company’s Le Brassus headquarters, Audemars Piguet’s Heritage and Museum Director Sébastian Vivas gives three reasons for the Mini Oak’s return. “It’s a revival of miniaturisation, a return to the quartz era of innovation, and a nod to the super-creative spirit of the 1990s,” he says.

Miniaturisation, Vivas is quick to point out, is an ancient branch of horology that as early as the 16th century saw watchmakers squeezing movements into rings for members of Europe’s aristocracy. “To reduce the size of a movement is as difficult as adding complications and increasing precision,” he notes.

It’s also very much an AP thing. Back in the early 20th century, the company was in a battle of wits with its Swiss neighbour LeCoultre to produce ever smaller movements, the two swapping records for smallness on numerous occasions in a tussle that would eventually result in the Lilliputian Calibre 101 of 1929, still touted today by Jaeger-LeCoultre as the world’s smallest mechanical movement. Not unreasonably, in Vivas’s estimation, Calibre 2730 is the miniaturisation continuation story, albeit in quartz.

And then there’s the nod to quartz innovation. AP, Vivas reminds us, was quick to dabble in quartz in the mid-1970s, although not always with great conviction. In 1980, the company would run an ad pushing the rectangular Royal Oak Model 6001 powered by the quartz Calibre 2510 asking whether such a thing was even “acceptable.”

AP would introduce another 11 quartz calibres into the early 1990s. But development slowed after the Mini Oak, as buyers and watchmaking culture turned to upscale mechanicals. This year’s Calibre 2730 is only the third quartz calibre to emerge from Audemars Piguet since 1997, capturing, as Vivas says, the agenda-setting spirit of the age, and of the original Royal Oak Mini.

The return of one of mechanical watchmaking’s superpowers to quartz rings with a certain significance. For Bill Prince, editor-in-chief of Wallpaper* and The Blend, as well as author of Royal Oak: From Iconoclast to Icon, it marks a shifting of the sands. “It goes back to that moment in the 70s and 80s, when dress watches were chosen primarily for their attractiveness,” he says. “We then went into a more mechanistic technical age after the Millennium, where having restated its relevance, the mechanical watch industry targeted technological savoir-faire, resulting in much larger watches. But we’ve come to the end of that period. Taste and fashionability are playing into watchmakers’ design considerations once again.”

What would be more significant still would be if consumer interest in mechanics were dwindling. For some, it is. “I don’t care that it’s quartz,” says Brynn Wallner, the 34-year-old founder of the watch channel Dimepiece, referring to the Mini Oak. “It’s fun and feminine and wearable. Just because it has a quartz movement doesn’t change the fact it’s a groundbreaking design. It still has that cachet, heritage and cultural impact.”

Quartz’s influence over the watchmaking establishment has been gaining for some time. Two of the industry’s biggest hype moments of recent years came from the Omega MoonSwatch pile-on and TAG Heuer’s Kith Formula 1 collaboration, both quartz stories that harnessed successful existing designs and retro associations to lure in a public more concerned with how a watch looks than how it works.

Elsewhere, Cartier’s growth spurt owes everything to its quartz montres de forme watches – Tank, Panthère, Santos, Baignoire – while the ashes of its now fabled Fine Watchmaking Division have long since blown away. In a sea of high-end mechanical watches, the almost comically small Tank Mini, its quartz movement tucked away in a case measuring a barely-there 16.5mm across, was one of the big stories of this year’s Watches and Wonders. And let’s not forget that Patek Philippe’s rectangular Twenty~Four has been ticking merrily away on quartz for forever and a day.

Wallner ups the ante. “All the ‘It’ girls are wearing Cartier quartz,” she says. “And look at the Met Gala. In order for celebrities to stand out, they need watches. But for the look, not what’s inside.”

When it comes to the debate around the Mini Oak’s intended gender, voices pushing non-gendered watches – “a watch is a watch" – have grown louder in recent years. It’s a movement given credence by the tastes of red-carpet mavens such as Timothée Chalamet, Austin Butler and Bad Bunny, all of whom have been captured sporting mini watches originally designed and marketed as women’s watches in recent times – thus reversing the orthodoxy of the boyfriend watch trope and at the same time giving credence to the non-gendered viewpoint.

For its part, Audemars Piguet has stopped short of explicitly describing the new Mini Oak as a woman’s watch, despite detailing the design’s links to its 19th century women’s watches, the work of Dimier and the Mini Oak of 1997 in its communications.

“It’s nice to know there’s an understanding that you can buy a watch that’s for anyone,” offers Wallner. “But it’s a happy coincidence for some brands that a watch is unisex, a get-out-of-jail free card that means they don’t have to make watches for women.”

She continues: “I was worried this was an existential crisis for women’s watches, because we still need watches designed for women. We need the size, the proportion, something that’s comfortable. The resurgence of these little pieces is really reassuring, because brands are now caring about the consumer, female-first. If men want to buy them, great, but it’s not going to be the bulk. This is for women. We shouldn’t let this unisex narrative takeover.”

With all that in the melting pot, the Royal Oak Mini is by some distance more than a decorative cocktail watch, as it might once have been described. It’s also distinctly Audemars Piguet. As Prince says: “AP can’t be traditional: there’s always the pursuit of the viably remarkable.” And in producing a 23mm quartz version of the mighty Royal Oak, it has achieved the viably remarkable – yet again.