50 years on, @audemarspiguet's mighty Royal Oak’s woven dial and octagon form are still utterly up-to-the-minute – 1/3 cover for 1010, Port's superlative horology supplement. Full story in bio, extract below – "Apparently, it was the decade that style forgot. But clearly the watchmakers dotting the valleys of the Swiss Jura – where, if not in Geneva, you’ll find the world’s finest – missed that memo. The ’70s was a challenging decade on many fronts, from fuel crises to equally challenging plaid shirts. Those in the business of mechanical timekeeping can be added to that list too, given the devastating toll of 60,000 jobs and 1,300 companies by 1980, entirely at the hands of Far Eastern quartz technology – first looming onto wrists in 1969 in the guise of Seiko’s Astron (hardly cheap from the outset, launch-price famously matching that of a Toyota Corolla, but swiftly industrialised to cereal-packet freebie status). Just as the ’60s ran from 1964 into 1972 or thereabouts, the ’70s watchmaking revolution started in 1969. Only, it was a revolution with many faces, both technical and design wise. For a start, before quartz had even got its hooks in, 1969 witnessed the three-pronged birth of a long-gestated form of mechanical wristwatch: the self-winding chronograph. Three of them from Breitling, Heuer and Zenith, in a single year. So how, to the backdrop of quartz ruination, global economic crises fuelled (or not, as the case may be) by oil shortages, as well as tanked-out R&D departments, did the ’70s see such an exuberance of creativity? Not only that, but lasting creations, far more resilient than the fickle increase of flares we’re seeing in high-street windows this season. If nothing else, we’re talking about Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak of course, whose 50th anniversary is being marked this year with admirable reserve: a hen’s-teeth clutch of period-correct, if novel colourways, given away by the stencilled-out “50” in the gold winding rotor, which you can watch spinning through the sapphire caseback." Design @astridstavro & @alessandromolent. Words Alex Doak, photography @leandro.farina, creative and set design @serenekhan