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It’s a big deal if Patek Philippe releases one of its watches with a new dial color or a new metal. In fact, Patek Philippe is so important to horology, the maison makes watch-world-shattering news if it simply decides to stop making a watch. That makes the magnitude of today’s announcement difficult to quantify. For the first time in 25 years, since the release of the ladies’ Twenty~4 in 1999, the watchmaker debuted a brand new collection named the Cubitus.
Patek Philippe’s impact on the world of haute horlogerie—“high watchmaking”—is hard to overstate. A member, along with Audemars Piguet and Vacheron Constantin, of what collectors refer to as the Holy Trinity, it has led even those august maisons with innovations that we today take for granted. In 1941, it released the reference 1526, the world’s first serially produced perpetual calendar wristwatch. As if that weren’t enough, it simultaneously debuted the world’s first serially produced perpetual calendar wristwatch combined with a chronograph with the reference 1518. It took the rest of the watch world some 50 years to produce a similar timepiece.
Jean-Daniel Meyer
The Roots of the Cubitus
In 1976, after decades of complicated pocket watch and wristwatch production, Patek rewrote the rulebook with the introduction of the Nautilus. Conceived of by famed watch designer Gérald Genta, this “luxury sport watch” helped—along with the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak, the Vacheron Constantin 222—to usher in the era of the high-end, stainless steel time-and-date timepiece. Whereas dedicated tool watches such as the Rolex Submariner and the Omega Seamaster had, for two decades, fulfilled the brief of providing robust, accurate timekeeping in all conditions, the luxury sport watch was about elevating stainless steel to the level of precious metal. Indeed, one vintage Nautilus advertisement proudly stated, “One of the world’s costliest watches is made of steel.” Luxury sport watches like the Nautilus are now the hottest pieces among collectors.
With time, the Nautilus came to be one of the most desirable watches on the planet. Escaping its stainless steel origins, it has been offered in precious metals and featured complications ranging from chronographs to perpetual calendars. However, it was long the simpler time-and-date model in stainless steel, the reference 5711, that not only captured the watch world’s collective imagination but pervaded the greater zeitgeist and became a pop culture icon in its own right. When it was announced in 2021 that Patek was discontinuing the 5711, it arrived with a shock. What other watchmaker would dare to put its most popular watch out of production?
