At this year’s Watches & Wonders, Patek Philippe revealed four new limited-edition Nautilus watches, celebrating the 50th anniversary of a watch that was designed in five minutes on a napkin and at the time rejected by his peers, and became the most coveted timepiece in the world.
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The man behind the watch
Gérald Charles Genta was born in Geneva on 1 May 1931, the son of a Swiss mother and an Italian father – a combination his wife Évelyne would later describe as the source of his dual nature. He had the Swiss knack for precision and the Italian instinct for beauty and design. His passion for design led him to study jewellery at the École d’Art de Genève, graduating in 1951 at just 20 years old.
In his early years, Genta had a very poor upbringing, once telling Évelyne: “I know the taste of poverty.” When he started out as a watch designer, he would drive around the major watchmaking regions of Switzerland from La Chaux-de-Fonds to Le Brassus knocking on the workshop doors looking for work.
Genta would then present his designs to the individual watch houses. Ridiculously, especially in this day and age, they paid him just 10 Swiss Francs for the designs they kept and they passed back to him the rejects. He would do this until he had 1,000 Francs, and then go home.
Today, he is regarded as one of the most influential people in the history of watchmaking. His designs are now recognised as being far in advance of their time. He designed some of the best known watches for Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet and IWC, among others.
Christie’s has subsequently described him as “the Fabergé of watches.” Over a career spanning six decades, over 100,000 watches were made from his designs. His clients included Prince Rainier of Monaco, King Hassan II of Morocco, King Juan Carlos of Spain, and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and his work is today spotted on the wrists of celebrities Hailey Bieber and Victoria Beckham, as well as footballers Lionel Messi and Paola Dybala. Remarkably, Genta himself only designed wristwatches. He didn’t actually wear them.
The Royal Oak and the quartz crisis
By the early 1970s, the Swiss watch industry was in crisis. Japan had begun producing quartz watches which were cheaper, more accurate, and mass-produced in ways that mechanical Swiss watchmaking could not match. Factories were closing. Brands that had defined the luxury market for generations were fighting for survival.
In 1970, Genta received a call from Audemars Piguet’s Georges Golay, a man with a vision for his company who knew how to harness Genta’s creative brilliance. Going counter-culture and against the weight of the quartz crisis, Golay asked Genta to draw him the most expensive sports steel watch in the world to be conjured by the next morning.
Genta delivered. The result was the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak the first luxury watch to be made from stainless steel, revolutionary since luxury watches were almost always made of precious metals, whilst steel was for functionality (for more on the Royal Oak, read about the limited edition collaboration between Travis Scott’s Cactus Jack and Audemars Piguet).
Its octagonal bezel with exposed screws, integrated bracelet and tapisserie dial were drawn from the shape of a deep-sea diving helmet. After initially slow demand, the watch finally became Audemars Piguet’s best seller, and remains so today.
The Royal Oak did something more significant than save one brand. It invented a category: the luxury sports watch. And in doing so, it gave Genta a template that Patek Philippe was watching very carefully.
Five minutes on a napkin
In Basel, during the annual watch fair, Genta was enjoying a quiet dinner in a hotel restaurant when he spotted some Patek Philippe executives at a nearby table. He asked a waiter for a pencil and paper. Within five minutes, he sketched what would become the Nautilus, using a ship’s porthole as his inspiration, complete with “ears” to represent the window’s hinges.
His thinking was to soften the sharp edges of the Royal Oak, to offer a less masculine watch, more suitable for women’s wrists as well as men’s. He shared his designs with Patek, but they did not immediately embrace the look. The brand did, however, see potential in a watch that could be enjoyed equally by both genders and subsequently bought the design.
The watch was named after Captain Nemo’s submarine in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It debuted at the Basel Fair in 1976 as Reference 3700 in a generous 42mm, and in steel, at what was then a ridiculously expensive price that shocked the market. Here was a house known for its gold dress watches, its grand complications, its centuries of quiet prestige and now they were selling a steel sports watch at a premium price. Not only it had a shape that looked, to many eyes, like a softer version of a competitor’s design.
The watch nobody wanted
Patek Philippe fans initially hated it when it was launched. It was the brand’s first sports watch, and because of its similarity to the Royal Oak, it drew scepticism from traditional collectors.
The success of the Nautilus was only gradual. It wasn’t until the women’s version, presented three years later, that it truly began to find its audience. The men’s big breakthrough only came towards the end of the 1990s nearly fully two decades after its launch.
What changed? Taste, partly. Culture, partly. The steel integrated bracelet, once seen as industrial came to read as understated luxury. The horizontal embossed dial, the softened octagonal bezel, the porthole silhouette: details that had seemed peculiar in 1976 looked inevitable by 2000. The watch had been right all along. The world had needed time to catch up.
Today, it’s one of the world’s most desired watches with prices ranging for a new Patek Philippe Nautilus range from around $42,547 to $1,707,058.61, including platinum models with multi complications. The range has even been extended to one off collaborations with Tiffany – Jay Z was spotted wearing a Tiffany Patek Nautilus in the New York jeweller’s celestial colourway. Tiffany & Co. teamed up with the luxury Swiss watch brand to create the Patek Philippe 5711/1A-018 Nautilus watch, a limited edition wristwatch with a Tiffany blue lacquered dial and co-branding.
From slow burn to impossible dream
Once the Nautilus found its moment, it didn’t stop. Today it is perhaps more of a hit than it ever was, with waiting lists for steel models stretching on for years. When Patek discontinued the steel Reference 5711 in 2021, the secondary market responded with something close to grief and pieces were trading at multiples of retail prices, collectors treating the announcement like a bereavement.
Genta did not live to see any of it. He died on 17 August 2011, four years before the Nautilus hysteria reached its peak. The watch he sketched in five minutes on a napkin, that Patek’s own collectors initially resisted, had become one of the most discussed, most desired, and most debated watches in the world. He designed it as a medium for his art. He was, his wife once said, as proud of his Timex designs as he was of the Nautilus.
Vintage references such as the original 3700/1 are now highly prized by collectors, while modern iterations retain the same core design principles with updated movements and materials.
The four anniversary pieces
To celebrate 50 years of the Nautilus, Patek Philippe’s answer was characteristically understated, just four new models. They’re all limited editions in white gold or platinum. Intriguingly there are no complications and no steel, the brand wanted to keep the vision clean and pay homage to Genta’s original design.
References 5810/1G-001 and 5810G-001 have returned the Nautilus to its large Jumbo format 41mm in the white gold, powered by the ultra-thin Caliber 240, a movement first presented in 1977, just a year after the Nautilus itself. Its 22K gold mini-rotor was engraved with “50 1976–2026”. One wore a white gold bracelet, limited to 2,000 pieces. The other wore a navy blue composite strap with cream stitching, limited to 1,000.
Reference 5610/1P-001 has revived the medium Nautilus format, 38mm in platinum, recalling the Reference 3800/1 of the 1980s. A diamond is set into the hinge at 9 o’clock, as Patek’s tradition dictates for all platinum models. It’s limited to 2,000 pieces.
The desk watch
The fourth piece was the one nobody saw coming and has been a surprise favourite at the fair. In fact many watch influencers are placing it in the top 5 watches of the fair. High praise indeed given there’s been so much ingenuity at this years Watches & Wonders and technically a clock. Reference 958G-001 is the first Nautilus desk watch. The iconic porthole silhouette, the horizontal relief embossing, the octagonal bezel with rounded corners, all translated into a 50.65mm white gold object designed for a surface rather than a wrist.
Its manually wound 8-Day caliber offered power reserve, instantaneous date and day, and small seconds. The inner case back was engraved: 50th Anniversary Nautilus 1976–2026 Patek Philippe. Limited to just 100 pieces.
Presented in cork
All four pieces arrived in a cork-exterior presentation case, a deliberate nod to the original Reference 3700 packaging of 1976 and the 40th anniversary editions of 2016.
Fifty years on, the watch Gérald Genta sketched in five minutes on a napkin, that his own client initially resisted, that took the better part of two decades to find its audience and is still being made, and still little removed from its original design. Some watches work from day one. Others take the world time to catch up. The Nautilus took a little time, but it was worth it.
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