In every field there are things that everyone takes for granted – usually because of their ubiquity, or because they've been around forever, or both. In watchmaking, there are a lot of these, thanks to how long watchmaking has been around, and also thanks to its fundamentally incremental nature. Spring bars are a good example; certain aspects of movement decoration are another. Of the latter, there might be nothing more ubiquitous than Geneva stripes, or waves, or, to give them their proper name, Côtes de Genève. They can be seen, executed to varying degrees of fineness, in watches at just about every price point imaginable, but when were they first used, and why?

Movement finishing exists for many reasons: as a manifestation of craft; purely for aesthetic appeal; as a natural outgrowth of care in manufacturing and pride in the quality of one's work. Geneva stripes seem to be purely decorative (like the beautiful openworking and anglage seen in the Audemars Piguet Double Balance Squelette, below) but they're not, as it turns out. After thinking about the why and when of their creation, for many years in an idle way, it finally occurred to me that it might not be a bad idea to ask someone who would might actually know the answer, and this week, while visiting Audemars Piguet Renaud & Papi, I asked Giulio Papi (one of the co-founders, and one of the most important figures in modern movement design and watchmaking) if he might know the origin story of Côtes de Genève. Unsurprisingly, he did.