25654BA Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar

We’ve all gotten used to wild Laurent Ferrier Grand Sport Tourbillons, FPJ Sport Rattrapantes, or even RMs today, they’re all over. But this was the first time high complication met sporting ambition. It is impossible to overstate the significance of reference 5554, the Royal Oak QP, first debuted in 1984. Collectors and enthusiasts know, but everyone else has forgotten. And it has manual corrector pushers. We never appreciate that which we have fully until it’s gone. Is the corrector pusher the manual transmission of perpetual calendars and on its way out? It’s possible. But either way, this is where it’s at. These early examples of a category-defining watch like this beautiful 25654BA are, despite absolute high values, relatively under-appreciated for the foundations they laid.

Post quartz crisis, AP had two successful watches in the market. The first was the 5548 (and its descendants), the perpetual calendar developed in secret which was the sole watch that brought fine mechanical watchmaking back to supremacy. The second, Genta’s masterpiece: the 5402. So what do you do? Hit the mashup button. AP squeezed the 5548’s incredible ultra-thin perpetual calendar movement into a Royal Oak case. The development was no small expense. It would be sold for outrageous money at the time, even marketed later as ‘…Still, the most expensive steel watch in the world’. By 1993 its price was about fourteen times what a steel Submariner went for back then, 45000 USD. And the case even went on a fast, just 8mm thin. This example has a correct early dial, Mark 1, with a ‘block’ AP signature instead of mixed caps. This example comes from just after, the ref. 25654BA, produced in just 422 examples from 1982 to 1993.

Few are really noting actively what a category-defining watch this was. It’s a shorts-and-split-seconds-kind-of attitude, which is just kind of hard to not love. And it’s a buyer’s market. The best example is given by a certain 25654, a grey mark 1, movement no 294173. In 2017, it hammered for 40K CHF at Phillips. By 2022, it hammered at 327K CHF. Now this is the exact same example and auction house, mind you, as controlled an experiment as we’re going to get. The Royal Oak QP has cooled considerably since that 50th sale. But the great ones are as great as they’ve ever been.

A special note here for this find. The first and last images are of the example on the market. The on-wrist photography is from a prior find almost a decade ago at A Collected Man. The example on offer sports a lovely case with its original, beautiful Mark 1 dial. The watch also includes myriad service receipts from multiple stops at AP. It comes from a well-regarded Genevan retailer.