In 1977, a young designer created a watch that entered the same conversation as the Royal Oak. Nearly fifty years later, the two worlds are closer than ever.
In the spring of 1977, a twenty-four-year-old designer named Jorg Hysek walked into the offices of Vacheron Constantin carrying a set of drawings. Five years earlier, Gerald Genta had designed the Royal Oak for Audemars Piguet — a watch that had quietly begun to change everything. What Hysek brought that day was a response: elegant, angular, architecturally precise, and powered by the very same movement that beat inside the Royal Oak itself. The Vacheron Constantin 222 was born. And with it, a design philosophy that runs as a continuous thread between Hysek’s work and the world of Audemars Piguet — right up to the present day.
To understand the connection between Jorg Hysek and Audemars Piguet, it is necessary to understand the moment both emerged from. The early 1970s were an existential crisis for Swiss watchmaking. The quartz revolution, arriving from Japan, threatened to render the mechanical watch obsolete. Swiss manufactures faced a stark choice: compete on price, or redefine what a luxury watch could be.
Audemars Piguet chose the latter. In 1971, the brand’s managing director Georges Golay called designer Gerald Genta the evening before the Basel fair with a brief that seemed impossible: design a completely new luxury sports watch in steel, overnight. As the story has been told many times since, Genta delivered the sketch the following morning. Inspired by a deep-sea diver’s helmet, the Royal Oak — reference 5402ST — debuted at Basel in 1972.
It was a radical provocation. In 1972, steel remained a utilitarian material, considered fit for tools but never for luxury watches. The Royal Oak’s octagonal bezel with eight exposed hexagonal screws, its fully integrated bracelet, and its ultra-thin movement positioned it as something genuinely new: a watch that was simultaneously a precision instrument and a sculptural object. It was priced higher than a gold Patek Philippe dress watch — and collectors slowly began to understand why.
Jorg Hysek was born on May 14, 1953, in East Berlin. In 1960, his family moved to Geneva — arriving just before the construction of the Berlin Wall sealed the border. He would grow up in the watchmaking capital of the world, absorbing its rhythms, its precision, and its demanding standards of craft from an early age.
His education was unconventional for the time. He studied micromechanics for two years at the Biel Technical School, then enrolled at the vocational school for watchmakers in Pforzheim, Germany. But it was a subsequent move to the London Academy of Arts — driven by a growing passion for sculpture — that shaped his design philosophy most profoundly. He returned to Switzerland with a sensibility that was simultaneously mechanical and artistic: a combination that would prove rare and extraordinarily valuable in watchmaking.
After completing his studies, he joined the design department at Rolex. He then founded his own design company, Hysek Styling, and began working as a freelance designer for the Geneva houses. One of his first clients was Vacheron Constantin.
"That myth is now dying out, as more people discover that the 222 was not just the work of the young Jörg Hysek, a watch design giant of equally impressive stature as Genta, but a rather brilliant piece of work, too."
In 1977, Vacheron Constantin sought to mark its 222nd anniversary with something bold — its own entry into the category that the Royal Oak had defined five years earlier. Rather than approach Genta, who had already given Patek Philippe the Nautilus the previous year, Vacheron turned to the young independent designer who had recently set up his studio in Geneva.
What Hysek delivered was the 222. Its tonneau-shaped case, distinctive notched bezel, and fully integrated bracelet were entirely his own — not derivative of the Royal Oak, but in direct conversation with it. As Vacheron Constantin’s own style and heritage director Christian Selmoni has confirmed, it is a popular misconception that Genta designed the 222. The design is Hysek’s, from first sketch to final specification.
The 222 was powered by the JLC Calibre 920 — finished by Vacheron as their Calibre 1121. This is a detail of considerable historical significance: the JLC Calibre 920 was the only movement in the history of watchmaking to be used simultaneously by all three brands of the Holy Trinity — Audemars Piguet, Patek Philippe, and Vacheron Constantin. The Royal Oak, the Nautilus, and the 222 all beat with the same mechanical heart. Jorg Hysek’s watch was, literally, built on the same foundation as the Royal Oak.
The 222 was produced for just eight years, from 1977 to 1985, in extremely limited numbers — approximately 500 pieces in steel, around 150 in yellow gold, and fewer than 100 in two-tone. Its rarity, combined with a renewed appreciation of its design, has made it one of the most sought-after vintage references in contemporary collecting. Vacheron reissued it in yellow gold in 2022 at £53,500, and in stainless steel in 2025 at £30,800 — confirming the canonical status of Hysek’s original design.
What connects the design world of Audemars Piguet with the work of Jorg Hysek is not a formal collaboration — it is something more fundamental. It is a shared conviction about what a watch should be.
Both approach the wristwatch as a sculptural object first and a timekeeping instrument second. The Royal Oak’s genius was not its movement — it was the way Genta conceived the case, the bezel, and the bracelet as a single unified form, each element inseparable from the others. The result was a watch that had the visual weight of architecture and the intimacy of jewelry. This is precisely the philosophy that Hysek brought to the 222, and that he has pursued throughout his career and into his current practice as a sculptor and artist.
As Chrono24 Magazine noted in January 2026, Hysek’s design philosophy is rooted in the belief that a watch should carry the same sculptural beauty as any piece of fine art. It is a philosophy that — whether by convergence or by the shared cultural atmosphere of Geneva in the 1970s — runs as a direct parallel to the thinking that produced the Royal Oak.
"Hysek's design philosophy is rooted in the belief that a watch should carry the same sculptural beauty as any piece of fine art."
Where Genta remained a watch designer until his death in 2011, Hysek followed the logic of his sculptural convictions to their ultimate conclusion. Having designed watches for Breguet, Boucheron, Cartier, Ebel, TAG Heuer, Tiffany, Seiko, and Dunhill — among others — he gradually shifted his primary focus from the applied art of watch design to the fine art of sculpture and painting.
His kinetic sculptures — the Toupie 1000, the Mechanical Heart, the Colonne du Temps — apply the same principles that governed his watch designs. Precision engineering. The integration of form and movement. The belief that a mechanical object can carry emotional and philosophical weight. In this sense, his sculptures are the direct successors to the 222: objects where the visible mechanism is inseparable from the aesthetic experience.
His paintings, particularly those on iron plate, continue the same dialogue — texture, material resistance, and the trace of physical process made permanent. The horological world that shaped him is always present, even when the clock hands are gone.
The context of this article is not incidental. Audemars Piguet returned to Watches and Wonders Geneva 2026 in April of this year, after a six-year absence from watch fairs — having last exhibited at the SIHH in 2019. The return marks a significant shift in the brand’s commercial and creative direction under its new CEO Ilaria Resta.
At Watches and Wonders 2026, AP announced the Atelier des Établisseurs — an initiative to preserve traditional watchmaking craft skills, drawing directly on the établissage system that dates to the 18th century. It is a gesture toward heritage, toward handcraft, toward the primacy of the maker’s hand over automated production. It is, in other words, a return to exactly the values that produced the Royal Oak in the first place — and that have guided Jorg Hysek’s entire career.
The parallel is precise: both the Royal Oak and the 222 were designed in an era when the craft of watchmaking faced an existential threat from industrial disruption. Both were responses that chose artistic ambition over commercial caution. In 2026, AP’s return to those founding values places it, once again, in the same philosophical territory as Hysek’s current work in sculpture and mechanical art.
The measure of a design is not what it is worth in the year it is made. It is what it is worth fifty years later, when the cultural moment that produced it is gone and only the object remains.
The Vacheron Constantin 222 is the direct ancestor of the Overseas collection, introduced in 1996 and still in active production today — most recently updated with an entirely new in-house movement, the Calibre 2550, revealed at Watches and Wonders 2026. Jorg Hysek’s original design of 1977, made in fewer than 800 pieces, gave rise to one of the three watches that define the Holy Trinity of luxury sports watchmaking. That is not a footnote. It is a founding contribution.
The Royal Oak, meanwhile, has become the defining luxury watch of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The design Genta delivered overnight in 1971 commands prices at auction that would have been unimaginable at the time of its creation. The two watches — the Royal Oak and the 222 — share a movement architecture, a cultural moment, a city, and a fundamental belief in the watch as an object of art. The designers who created them were, in the deepest sense, working in the same tradition.
Discover Jorg Hysek's current work — kinetic sculptures and mechanical art rooted in the same philosophy that shaped the 222.
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