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SIHH 2010: Piaget

Being predominantly known for making ladies’ jewellery watches, Piaget is slowly but surely moving towards earning recognition for its solid range of men’s watches with respectable, in-house calibres.

Last year Piaget’s flagship launch was the Polo FortyFive, a 45 mm titanium and steel sports watch. This year the main new product goes in a totally different direction. Created to celebrate the 50^th anniversary the ultra-flat 12P movement, the thinnest movement in the world at the time, the new Altiplano pieces with the 1200P and 1208P calibres are the slimmest automatics available today. Piaget has a long, if not particularly well known, history of ultra-slim watches, so these new calibres are here to remind the public about that tradition.

Both calibres, one with seconds and the other without, are 2.35 mm high and sit in cases 5.25 mm thick. Aside from the seconds hand on the 1208P, the other discernible difference is the platinum micro-rotor on the 1200P and the gold rotor on the 1208P. The movements are large at 13 ¼ ’” in size (just under 30 cm) but everything else about them is small. A longish 40 hour power reserve is achieved thanks in part to the small balance wheel. Movement decoration is of a high standard but modern in style.

As a matter of historical interest, though these are the slimmest automatic movements today, and will probably remain so for some time, Jean Lassale made even slimmer automatic and manual wind movements in the seventies. They were extremely thin, a hair over 2 mm for the automatic and just over 1 mm for the manual-wind, and also overly delicate. The company went south after a few years, was eventually acquired by Seiko and is now defunct.

The first version of the new Altiplano is the Altiplano 43 mm with the 1208P movement, available in rose or white gold. Piaget smartly gave this watch a three-tiered dial with the sub-seconds recessed into the lowest level, preserving the overall height.

Fitted with the 1200P is the Altiplano 43 mm Anniversary Edition. Also presented in a white or rose gold case, with 235 pieces made of each, the Anniversary Edition watch features only two hands against a dark dial (blue for the rose gold and black for the white) with a guilloche hour track. The obligatory limited edition spiel runs in a semicircular arc from nine to 12 but the letters are small and not especially prominent.

Both ultra-slim Altiplanos are large at 43 mm, but elegant due to their pure design and thinness. That being said I would not be surprised to see a smaller, perhaps 40 mm version in the future.

Another addition to the Altiplano collection is the Gem-set Skeleton. This is a 40 mm, though it looks small, white gold watch set with nearly 400 diamonds, albeit small ones, totalling about 2.5 carats. The manual-wind movement alone has 174 diamonds set on the bridges, which are solid gold.

Receiving a facelift is the Altiplano Double Jeu. Fitted with two slim movements in a 43 mm hinged case, the Double Jeu displays twin time zones exceptionally legibly. The lower dial now displays the time in a 24 hour format.

Also receiving a facelift is the well received Polo FortyFive. I spoke positively about this last year – I was wrong as the 2010 edition is even better. Piaget has cut open the dial, exposing the main plate, as well as giving it a liberal dash of red. The hour markers sitting on a track above the date wheel is especially striking. One aspect of the FortyFive I did not like last year was the text on the subdials of the chronograph. With the open dial the text is no longer apparent at all. This is the perfect dial for the watch.

Polo FortyFive Chronograph  

The case is titanium with horizontal steel inserts as before. Both versions use the same in-house movements first seen in last year’s FortyFive. Attractive as it is, this variant of the FortyFive is a limited edition.

Polo FortyFive Automatic

Ladies now have the option of the sports Polo in a smaller size in various iterations, including the ubiquitous white-with-diamonds combination shown below.

Two new models were added to the Emperador Coussin line, though both are variations of the moon phase model launched last year. The first features a cloisonné enamel dial, depicting Asia and the Middle East in this case, but presumably any region the customer desires. This is a beautifully crafted and attractive watch but the hands are disturbingly unsophisticated.

The second moon phase features a sparkling aventurine dial that complements the moon phase perfectly. Both this and the cloisonné dial moon phase possess such fine-looking dials that I didn’t initially notice the diamonds set on the case.

Lastly come a few ladies watches. The first pair is two from the new Limelight Jazz Party collection, a range of watches and jewellery with a musical theme. Both the watches shown are ‘secret’ watches, with dials that are revealed only by sliding away a cover. The second watch is impressively set with sizeable black and white diamonds and would look stunning on a lady’s wrist.

The Magic Hour, a clever watch with an oval rotating bezel that gives the watch three different look (bezel vertical, diagonal and horizontal) is now available set with more diamonds than before.