There was a distinctly festive vibe at the booth belonging to Piaget at this year’s Watches & Wonders fair. Above the glass vitrines festooned with gem-encrusted timepieces and sumptuous seating for groups of lounging press, an enormous, 10 ft high screen projected the words ‘PIAGET 150’ in front of a group of dancing silhouettes, all dressed to the nines and revelling against a signature blue background. ‘This house’, it seemed to proclaim to the world, ‘is officially in party mode’.
2024 marks the 150th year of the luxury Swiss maker, which was founded by Georges-Édouard Piaget in the small village of La Côte-aux-Fées in 1874. A farmer by trade, Piaget turned his hand to making pocket watches during the winter off-season and by 1911, when Piaget’s son Timothée took over the family business, timepieces had become a full-time operation. For the next three decades, Piaget’s workshops crafted watches and components for other brands until the third generation of the family, Gérald and Valentin Piaget, registered the name as a trademark in 1943, and the manufacture began producing its own creations – including ultra-thin mechanical watch movements that could fit inside of a halved coin.
It was Valentin Piaget that, in the 1960s, went on to challenge his designers to “do what has never been done before”, resulting in a bespoke range of super-thin jewellery watches crafted from gold and embellished with ornamental stone dials in Mediterranean hues, which catapulted the firm into the international spotlight. A coterie of famous personalities, like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren and Andy Warhol, declared themselves fans and were eventually nicknamed the ‘Piaget Society’ for their love of the maison’s glamorous timepieces.
This was followed by Piaget’s debut collections of equally dazzling jewellery, which were crafted at the brand’s in-house gold workshop, (unveiled in 1969), including the renowned ‘21st Century’ line, with cuffs, pendants and sautoir necklaces that proposed a fabulous and and carefree new way to wear watches.
It’s to these incredible archive pieces that Stéphanie Sivrière, Piaget’s current creative director, turns whenever she needs inspiration, and that were at the forefront of her mind when she began designing the maison’s 150th anniversary collection of jewels and watches two years ago. “I knew I wanted to highlight the savoir-faire of the maison, but not to copy the designs of archive pieces wholesale. The point is always to take tiny details from everywhere and transform them into something more modern, to retain the stylistic grammar of the house,” she says, giving as an example Piaget’s iconic ‘Palace Décor’ engraving technique, which was originally one of dozens of different types of engraving that Piaget used to do, and that Sivrière first revived in the early 2000s for a high jewellery collection.
The technique is now a contemporary signature, used to give a sumptuous, satin-like texture across many of the house’s jewels and watches, including a new yellow gold Phoenix high jewellery watch. Goldsmithing is an important part of Piaget’s history, something that Sivrière was very keen to acknowledge across the entirety of the almost 100-piece-strong anniversary collection.
“I became obsessed with the art of chain making, which has long been a tradition at Piaget but had become a bit forgotten in the past few years. So, I tried to include elements of chain making or gold detailing in most of the pieces, as a kind of thread to connect it with the past and revive it again,” she reveals. One beautiful example of this is a matching cuff and necklace set featuring sweetie-like sapphire cabochons, each wrapped in fine twists of yellow gold ‘thread’.
“Those pieces were super complicated to produce, actually, as my team kept proposing ideas that would make them stiff, but I always wanted them to remain supple and flexible, so there was a lot of back and forth between us. Because I actually began my training as a jeweller, I knew it could eventually be done,” recalls Sivrière. Another eye-catching ring boasts an oval-cut yellow sapphire nestled within looped ‘ribbons’ of gold set with white diamonds, whilst a pair of ornate cuff watches are formed with intricate gold ‘braids’, arranged in fringes and festooned with slivers of bright turquoise as a nod to the brand’s 1960s and 70s heyday.
Piaget’s irreverent tradition of fusing ornamental stones such as lapis lazuli, turquoise, opal and malachite with precious gems such as diamonds finds strong parallels in Sivrière’s latest work, particularly in a set of dramatic Swinging Sautoirs, crafted as a tribute to the models that revolutionised the maison’s business in the late 1960s. “Hard stones are an important part of Piaget’s creative vocabulary, so it was imperative to use them,” says Sivrière, who admits to a particular fondness for the clear, ‘David Hockney’s Pool’ blue of turquoise from the famed, but sadly inoperative, Sleeping Beauty mine in Arizona.
“Because the mine is no longer working, my gemstone buyer and I have to source vintage turquoise, which takes a long time, and comes with added complications because you may not necessarily find the right quantity or size of the stones you need. For one of the new Swinging Sautoirs, for example, we needed lots of perfectly matching turquoise beads, so the piece ended up taking hundreds of hours to complete. It was worth it because all the shades of blue and green, which I love, perfectly recall the spirit and allure of the 60s and 70s that I wanted to evoke,” she says.
A visual thinker, Sivrière feels such passion for using coloured stones to evoke feelings of happiness and celebration in others that she will often draw and redraw a preparatory ‘gouache’ up to 10 times, until she achieves a combination of hues that is “perfectly harmonious”. “I will never do things that are ‘punk’, or ‘baroque’ or ‘gothic’. Piaget is all about joyful colour,” she says. The entire anniversary collection, she also reveals, took her and her team five months to conceive, but production of a few key pieces, to be revealed during the second half of this year, “is still ongoing” – such is the intricate and complex nature of Piaget’s exquisite craftsmanship.
Indeed, Sivrière’s entire team felt enormous pressure when designing another key part of this year’s major celebrations at Piaget – the new Polo 79 watch, a sleek take on the gleaming 1980s original that was launched earlier this year. “This watch took over six years to perfect. At several points, I had to put my sketches away in a drawer and forget about them for a while, before coming back to them. There was such a huge pressure. I thought, do we dare approach this iconic piece? How could we possibly improve on it?” she notes.
One major challenge of was updating the timepiece, which was previously a quartz-powered model, with an automatic mechanism and still keep it comfortably slim. “We adjusted every single detail, every gadroon, to win a matter of millimetres for the movement,” says Sivrière. “Luckily, Piaget specialises in ultra-thin movements. So, the result is, as I wanted, almost thin enough to just be a bracelet.” As a proud watchmaker that is also a jeweller, Sivrière says, there is no difference between designing timepieces and crafting jewellery, aside from sizing constraints given by the case of a watch. “This is why, in my team, everyone works on designing everything. I will have watch designers work on high jewellery pieces, and jewellery designers working on watches. That way, you not only get a stylistic continuity, you also challenge everyone to think outside of the box and incredibly innovative, novel ideas can emerge. That is often the key to Piaget’s elegant and surprising designs.”
For Sivrière, the twin concepts of ‘elegance’ and ‘surprise’ are at the heart of every piece she conceives. “Piaget is very special like that. Those two words are exactly what our brand word, ‘Extraleganza’, really means for me and what I hope the new collection embodies.” When describing her hopes for the next 150 years of Piaget, Sivrière is equally succinct. “I want us to keep being as unique and creative as possible. That’s it.”
Creative direction Tim Holloway; Lighting assistant Jonathan Imhof; Production Malcolm Mafara
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