We sit down with jewellery designer Carolina Bucci in her native Florence to discuss her latest collaboration with Audemars Piguet
Carolina Bucci recalls her first brush with Audemars Piguet vividly. The Florence-born, London- based jewellery designer spotted the Royal Oak in the wild and was immediately smitten. “I was in New York and I was walking on the street and I spotted a lady across the street wearing something on her wrist that caught my attention,” she says. “So I crossed the street and started following her to get close enough to see what it was.”
“By the way, this happens all the time,” interjects her husband James Pyner, who is also the CEO of Bucci’s eponymous brand. We’re sitting on the garden terrace of the Four Seasons Firenze. Bucci wears an easy white jersey dress, strings of her candy-coloured stones hang around her neck. It is a family business – she is the third-generation of Buccis to meticulously handcraft jewels at their monastery-come-atelier in central Florence.
Photos courtesy of Audemars Piguet.
But back to the watch. “I loved the way that it hugged her wrist,” she recalls. So Bucci and her husband went to Audemars Piguet to try to procure it – Pyner has been buying his wife watches with some regularity for years because he “can’t buy her jewellery”. As it turns out, it was a men's watch from the '70s that was no longer in production. But that simple inquiry sparked a years long relationship between Bucci and Audemars Piguet. Now, for their fourth collaboration, Bucci applies her signature aesthetic and obsessive craftsmanship to the 34mm Royal Oak, in honour of the watch’s 50th anniversary.
This time around, Bucci took a rather unexpected approach, rendering the watch in a slick, sexy black ceramic. “I wanted to create something very sporty, very stealth,” she says. “The dial is still a mirror, but there’s a surprise in there.” She slips the watch off her wrist and hands it to me. She takes her iPhone and turns on the flashlight. As she flashes the light over the watch face, a holographic rainbow appears. “I was inspired by finding beauty in an unexpected place,” she says.
Photos courtesy of Audemars Piguet.
It was no easy task to achieve this hidden rainbow. “Even with just the mirror dial, to create a surface so simple, so clean and so perfect is a nightmare because you cannot have a spec of dust or a fingerprint and a lot of dials were breaking,” she says. “So from a production point of view was a headache, but the result was nailed.” Only 300 watches were made and if previous Bucci collaborations are anything to go by, they’re poised to be snatched right up and appreciate in value on the secondary market.
As I hand Bucci back her watch, I ask if she actually uses it to tell time or if she relies on her iPhone. She laughs and holds up her iPhone, sheepishly. “But I feel naked without the watch,” she says. And as for the first Royal Oak she spotted on the street, her husband managed to find her a pre-loved one.
Photo courtesy of Audemars Piguet.