One of the industry’s most famous—or infamous, depending on how you feel about it—designs, the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak set new standards for luxury watchmaking in the face of complete annihilation. It’s been heralded as an icon, a milestone, a game-changer—but does a tourbillon make it better, or worse?

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?