Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore Watches

The apocalypse is coming. It’s a fact of life. Whether it’s of the four horsemen or mushroom cloud variety is yet to be seen—what’s for certain is that we need to be prepared. So, with the stockpiling, bunker building and survival training, we’ll need a watch—a watch that can survive the end times.

Perhaps it’s self-indulgent on my part, but I’m sure we can all identify with the dream of owning a collection of the most impressive and desirable watches in the world. As far as getting to experience and enjoy such delights, if only for a while, it’s a good enough excuse for me for another instalment of the dream watch collection.

The dress watch is perhaps the hardest watch to master. It has to be simple, it has to be manual wind, it has to have no complications—small seconds at a push—and it has to be small, both in diameter, but more importantly, thickness. This leaves very little for a watchmaker to hide behind, only the quality of the watchmaking itself left to do the talking. How do the very best brands in the world do it?

Ever since it was discovered that combining iron, chromium and carbon made a material that could be used to make almost anything, stainless steel has been king of construction. It’s strong, it’s malleable, its hardy—and that’s why it’s also used for making watches. What more could you ask than that? Well, apparently you can get watches made of other, more exotic materials as well. But why?