In-Depth: How Piaget Defined The 1970s, And How It Can Do The Same Today
Piaget didn’t even register its own trademark until 1943, despite watchmaker Georges-Édouard Piaget founding his workshop in the Swiss Jura in 1874. For most of its existence, Piaget was just fine ticking in the background, quietly making some of the most capable mechanical movements in Switzerland.
But when it started putting its own name on the dial, that changed in an extravagant way. Soon, Piaget’s lavish style became nearly synonymous with an era of opulence, a symbol of aspirational American high society in the ’60s and ’70s just as much as the roster of names who wore it: Andy Warhol, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Miles Davis, Elvis Presley, and many others.
A Piaget ad in Vogue from 1970.
Recently, it’s felt a bit like everyone – collectors, dealers, even Piaget itself – has been trying to recapture this golden age of the brand. At the same time dealers and auction houses have rediscovered vintage Piaget stone dials and Polos, Piaget is popping up again on the wrists of contemporary celebrities. The energy behind Piaget has had me of two minds: on the one, I remember a time (just a few years ago) when many of these watches sold for next to nothing and sat in jewelers’ cases buried beneath more popular watches from Rolex, Omega, or Cartier. On the other, I do get a certain pleasure from the insouciant luxury of a vintage gold Polo, too carefree to worry whether these watches have been hyped more than a Warhol screen print or not. With that, I wanted to look beyond the hype and into the history of Piaget to see what it tells us about the present and future of collecting Piaget.
A look into the Piaget style of the 1970s, image (and watches) courtesy of Mendel Watches.
An Ultra-Thin History Of Piaget
Piaget was a manufacturer long before becoming a designer. Watchmaker Georges-Édouard Piaget set up his first workshop in 1874 on his family’s farm in the Swiss Jura mountains. It passed within the family from generation to generation, remaining a movement manufacturer until the 1940s, when Gérald and Valentin Piaget (Georges-Édouard’s grandsons), with the guidance of their father, decided that Piaget should be not just a manufacturer, but also a true luxury brand. In 1945, Piaget opened a new factory in its hometown of La Côte-aux-Fées.
These ultra-thin calibers meant watches with slim profiles. Note the sharp hallmark on the left lug that makes it look like this case hasn’t been polished.
A look at the caliber caliber 12P, featuring an off-center gold rotor.
1970s Piaget with a lapis lazuli dial and ultra-thin caliber 12P.
Thereabouts begins Piaget’s manic pursuit of ultra-thin calibers, which culminated in the creation of calibers 9P and 12P. Piaget introduced the manual-wind caliber 9P in 1957, measuring just 2mm thick. The automatic caliber 12P came in 1960, just 2.3mm thick with an off-center gold rotor. While Piaget had built its business as a third-party supplier to other brands, here it started to show some serious business acumen: As if aware of the creative possibilities these ultra-thin movements might create, Piaget kept them exclusively for its own watches. And since they considered these calibers pretty damn precious, this also meant it only put them in precious metal watches. Not until the introduction of the Polo S in 2016 would Piaget have an all-steel watch collection (“S” standing for steel).
“These ultra-thin movements opened the door to new creative possibilities – colors, dials, shapes, and new movements,” says Jean-Bernard Forot, Piaget’s Head of Patrimony. Unlike many previous bite-sized calibers, these new ultra-thin calibers were thin and wide, giving Piaget and its designers more space for artistic expression.
Piaget would often hire workers from the fashion industry who had experience working with chains or silk, so delicate was its work crafting bracelets and threading gold.
In the early ’60s, Piaget integrated another workshop in Geneva that allowed it to become a more vertical manufacturer and work with gold on its own. Even today, Piaget is one of the few manufacturers that still melts its own gold – this also meant Piaget was able to experiment with gold engraving, cases, and bracelets, displaying more variety than a modern Grand Seiko catalog.
Like A Rolling Stone
Piaget advertising shows the variety of bracelets, dials, and cases offered in the ’60s and ’70s.
No one translated the vibrance and energy of the 1960s and ’70s into a watch like Piaget, and perhaps no other brand could have. Born only a couple of decades prior, Piaget was full of the youthful post-War glamor that all those other old and stodgy Swiss brands weren’t, and it showed. It didn’t have the weight of expectations and felt liberated to do its own thing, not unlike the hippies it came of age beside.
“Piaget has always been ornamental,” says Forot. “Because Piaget is young in its watch expression, it didn’t have to go back to its history when it started designing watches.” This allowed more creative expression; Forot says the ’70s was the peak of the Piaget style, when it chose to become the leader of dress watches for men and women.
“Piaget was never in the race of complications or accuracy,” says Forot. “Piaget is the jeweler approaching watches, the jeweler of time.” Sure, Piaget pursued ultra-thin calibers, but even that was in service of the design.
First came the stone dials. In 1963, Piaget introduced its first stone collection: colorful lapis lazuli (blue), jade (green), opal (off-white), malachite (green), tiger’s eye (brown), and others. Piaget’s stone dials were cut to under one millimeter, meaning they were incredibly fragile and difficult to work with. We’ll get to what this means for modern collectors in a moment. Traditionally, colored dials had been achieved with paint or lacquer, but using those methods, each dial looks the same. Look at 10 lapis dials though, and they’ll all look different. Forot said this feeling of uniqueness only added to the exclusive feel of these stone dials.
The Piaget “Style Selector” gave plenty of options for its clients…
…this is the watch Jackie Kennedy chose – now it sits in Piaget’s archives.
Even today, brands will talk about how difficult it is to work with stone. In 2009, Richard Mille experimented with hard stone dials in the RM018. During production, RM said it had a failure rate of more than 90 percent because stones kept breaking; the watch ended up launching two years late, and only 30 pieces were produced. And Piaget was trying this 40 years earlier than those supercar-adjacent RMs.
At first, Piaget remained a fairly small operation and these stone dial watches were nearly bespoke, with Piaget even offering a customization service that allowed its clients to pick from a near-infinite combination of dials, bezels, bracelets, cases, and finishes. Soon they’d be found on the rich and famous of the era: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley, and so many others. And it wasn’t just stone dials: the ultra-thin calibers meant Piaget made necklace watches, pursue watches, coin watches – pretty much anything that could tell time.
A necklace from Piaget’s 21st Century Collection and a unique gold cuff watch.
This would lead to the formation of what Piaget called the “Piaget Society.” Basically, these were champagne-and-caviar events in big cities across the world that you or I would never be invited to, full of Piaget’s famous patrons. This was largely thanks to Yves Piaget, a fourth-generation Piaget who first trained as an engineer in Switzerland before moving to Los Angeles to study gemology. Steeped in the traditions of the Swiss Jura, but acutely aware of the power of the glitz and the glamor that was Hollywood, Yves seemed to understand the benefit of having actors, musicians, artists, and athletes as patrons of his brand.
“The Piaget family wasn’t focused on creating icons, but on creating a style.”
Jean-Bernard Forot, Piaget Head of Patrimony
This relationship with artists went a step further in 1967, when Piaget began producing watches with Salvador Dali and using his name. He wasn’t the only artist with a penchant for Piaget: Andy Warhol began buying up Piaget watches in 1973 (he owned at least 10), even though he didn’t meet Yves Piaget until 1979, when he became a key figure in the Piaget Society.
Quartz And The Polo
The original Piaget Polos – quartz and a whole lot of gold.
One of the Piaget watches most often associated with Andy Warhol is his Beta 21, the quartz movement that Piaget developed in consortium with Rolex, Patek, and 18 other manufacturers. Many of these Swiss brands would put the Beta 21 caliber inside thick and chunky watches.
“Piaget was kind of embarrassed by this,” Forot says, explaining that the brand felt it went against its ethos of ultra-thin watchmaking. “So, they made theirs a stepped case to create the visual illusion of a thinner watch.”
A vintage Piaget Beta 21 with lapis dial. Image: courtesy of The Keystone
But Piaget still wasn’t happy with this result, so it developed its own quartz movement, launching the quartz caliber 7P in 1976. This allowed Piaget to launch perhaps its most important design in 1979: the Piaget Polo.
The Polo jumped on the whole luxury sports watch trend of the ’70s, but in a very Piaget way. It’s super thin, the bracelet and watch are completely integrated, and it was conceived of from the beginning as a “jewelry watch,” only made in precious metals. It was the same design for men and women and the first Piaget watch with a model name. While produced mostly with quartz movements, there is a rare automatic version that’s something of a grail for hardcore Piaget lovers.
Piaget has long been caught somewhere in the beautiful expanse between elegance and extravagance: between hosting those champagne-and-caviar Society parties but doing so rather discreetly; between producing only luxurious precious metal watches, but also making them unobtrusive and ultra-thin. Nowhere is this more perfectly expressed than with the Polo.
That’s a lot of gold for a quartz watch. At right, advertising shows how Piaget designed the original Polo for men and women, in two sizes.
“Before the Polo, you used to just wear Piaget the way you’d wear Chanel,” Forot says. “The Piaget family wasn’t focused on creating icons, but on creating a style.” This had worked in Europe, especially in Italy, but Piaget was relatively unknown in the U.S. Its agent in the States told Piaget if it wanted to succeed in the U.S., it needed a model name. With that, the Piaget Polo was born.
After the Polo, cultural awareness of Piaget continued to grow. It’s perfectly cast on Robert DeNiro’s wrist in Casino, just as much as the real-life wrists of Andy Warhol or Brooke Shields.
Piaget was far from the only brand to harness the energy of the ’60s and ’70s into its watchmaking. There’s Cartier and its Crash, which has also surged in popularity the last few years; soon, Rolex would offer stone dials in its Day-Date and Datejust models, with more than 100 types to choose from. Vacheron, Audemars Piguet, Patek Philippe, and others were surprised by Piaget’s stone dials, but soon followed suit in adding them to their collections too.
But Piaget pioneered this and kept it different, more purely and unabashedly ’70s and not weighed down by the Art Deco or mid-century origins of many of Cartier’s or Rolex’s designs.
Behind the Piaget Trend
A special-order stone dial watch that Piaget made for a client.
Recently, it’s felt like there’s been renewed interest in this era of Piaget from collectors, dealers, and even Piaget itself. It’s not like the trend towards Piaget’s stone dials and ’70s style is totally new. In 2017, Piaget released a limited run of Altiplanos with stone dials to celebrate the ultra-thin model’s 60th anniversary.
“There’s a real trend to the 1970s right now – furniture, fashion, jewelry, and watches,” Forot says. “Piaget was very strong during that period. For instance, if the trend was the ’30s we’d suffer, but no one did the ’70s like Piaget.” In some ways, the watch world isn’t so different from the rest of the world. Even with the recent trend, some say vintage Piaget still represents a decent value.
“Sure, some pieces have started fetching crazy prices at auction, and others – the more entry-level pieces the brand did back in the day – have doubled in price,” says Harris, a dealer at Mendel Watches. “But, you can still get amazing or crazy pieces in the $5,000 to $10,000 range that are worth a lot more in terms of intrinsic value, craftsmanship, and design.” This might be true, but while vintage Piaget is a fun novelty for a few grand, it’s become a more serious investment nowadays. And it’s a specialized area of collecting, like a boss level you unlock after exploring the more discovered areas of collecting like Rolex, Cartier, even Jaeger-LeCoultre.
Perhaps the Piaget trend started with the interest in those Genta-designed ’70s steel sport watches, both as an outgrowth of and reaction to the ubiquity of steel and sport everything. Those geometric designs opened people up to the shapes of the ’70s, but after being beaten over the head with these watches, it was time for something just a little different. (Cynically, perhaps dealers were tired of acquiring these watches at high prices and wanted a new slant that wasn’t quite as expensive.) Vintage Piaget sits somewhere between steel sport watch and those shaped Cartier watches, perfectly splitting the difference between two trends of the past few years. And while the original (steel) Royal Oak and Nautilus are a bit demure in their statement of luxury, Piaget is unashamedly luxurious and of the 1970s. And let’s be honest: today, a bright stone dial or a shiny gold bracelet sure pops on Instagram for those concerned with such things. It’s precious metal, geometric designs, bright stone dials, playing polo on the lawn and hanging out at Studio 54 with Andy Warhol looking on.
When there’s this much consensus around a certain brand or era, it makes me inherently skeptical. And even I can remember when these vintage Piagets were selling for next to nothing, tossed in cases underneath more popular Rolex or Omega watches. Even today, it’s not like they’re that hard to find; walking around the Miami Beach Antique Show earlier this year, vintage Piaget was a common sight, with those bright stone dials or gold bracelets begging to be bought. No doubt, some dealers saw this as an opportunity.
But, beyond any hype, a lot of Piaget watches from this era are objectively interesting. These stone dials, often paired with bracelets that wear more like silk than metal, were expensive when first released, and unlike anything offered by other watchmakers. Like with any area of collecting, it takes time to become versed in the world of Piaget, especially since there’s nearly endless variety. That said, while there are some special vintage Piaget watches, Piaget also produced a lot of those entry-level pieces that just aren’t as collectible. It’s also increasingly difficult to find those Piaget watches that are special in good condition.
A vintage turquoise dial with a crack through the “Piaget” signature. Because these dials were less than a millimeter thick, they’re often cracked or damaged, which significantly impacts their value. This one can be found for just 100 bucks on eBay.
If you’re thinking about buying a stone-dial Piaget, buy a loupe first. Because these dials are so thin, many are cracked and it’s often hard to see. And if you can see a crack with the naked eye, it’s a pass. There are different opinions about whether Piaget dials are more fragile than others, but some have mentioned that because Piaget’s cases were also so thin (for example, compared to a Rolex Oyster case), they’re also set differently and more prone to cracks.
“A lot of bracelets are also stretched, lengthened by independent jewelers,” Harris of Mendel Watches says. He explained that Piaget would produce bracelets in a pattern that only it knew how to make, so you can usually tell if they’ve been modified after the fact. A lot of bracelets are also just too short because it’s practically impossible to properly lengthen them once they’ve been cut. Finally, because many of these pieces contained so much gold, dealers would often just melt them down, thinking (or knowing) there was more value in the melt value than in the watch itself. Not until recently has this changed.
A 1985 Piaget Polo ref. 7131 featuring a jumbo square case that sold for €7,620 at Sotheby’s in March.
Meanwhile, it still feels a little weird to talk about “collecting” the vintage Piaget Polo. Not to say you can’t collect “style” – plenty of people collect bags and clothes and other style items – but just that it doesn’t fit the traditional mold of what watch collectors think of as “collectible.” But, this probably has more to do with watch collectors than with any inherent shortcoming of the Polo. It never set out to be anything more than a great design – “Piaget’s style has always been ornamental,” as Forot told me. But if you handle a few of these vintage Piagets, the quality and craftsmanship are apparent, of higher quality than anything other watchmakers were producing at the same time.
Forot explained that often, Piaget would hire workers who came from the fashion world, experienced in making chains, bracelets or even threading silk because of the way Piaget worked with and threaded its gold to make its watches. It shows – some of these watches immediately melt onto your wrist. Yes, many of those “entry-level” vintage Piagets feel thin or fragile and aren’t terribly special, but many are.
Recapturing The 1970s
A yellow gold and turquoise Piaget cuff that sold at Sotheby’s in May. Inside is Piaget’s ultra-thin caliber 9P, the movement that allowed so many dazzling designs.
Luxury is all about fitting in while standing out, and Piaget met that brief perfectly in the ’70s in the way it’s trying to for this current moment. It feels like I’ve been watching the momentum for Piaget grow for a few years now. I remember dealers and collectors posting about the value these watches represent a few years ago, seemingly shouting into a void. Then, I started to see some celebrities wearing Piaget: first, Michael B. Jordan wearing a vintage gold Piaget Polo, then, the Weeknd wearing a (ladies’) gem-set Piaget on a red carpet. Dealers continued to scoop up these watches, and prices started to go up, too. Since these were so customizable back in the ’70s, nowadays each find feels like it might be unique, and auction houses are quick to call nearly every Piaget they list as “possibly unique.”
Meanwhile, auction results have risen. Just look at Geneva’s auction results and you can find a few of Piaget’s jewelry watches selling for more than $50,000 (jade and lapis, lapis, and turquoise). Because each piece is almost unique, it’s hard to directly compare auction results, but look in catalogs for five years ago and you’ll see prices were often half this.
A trio of vintage Piagets with rotating diamond dials.
Even so, big-time European dealers like Davide Parmegiani and George Somlo have long been fans of this era of Piaget. Back in 2017, Somlo said he’d been buying them for years and had recently seen prices rising quickly, finding himself often bidding against Piaget at auction for some of the most beautiful pieces. No doubt, these are bold designs that aren’t for everything, but that’s just fine.
Modern Piaget, too, seems to have taken an increased interest in figuring out how to incorporate its heritage into its contemporary products. The contrast between the vintage Polo and the modern iteration illustrates the predicament of Piaget. The brand produced the original Polo until 1988, when Richemont acquired the house. After this, it laid dormant until the early 2000s, when Piaget reintroduced the Polo. It was bigger, and (in my opinion) uglier, with the larger version using an automatic caliber, but it had a loose connection to the original Polo.
Then in 2016, Piaget introduced the Polo S to celebrate the manufacturer’s 150th anniversary. It’s still a sporty watch, but beyond that, it doesn’t have much resemblance to the exuberance of the original Polo. The “S” stands for steel and it’s also offered on a rubber strap; if we’re being honest, it looks more like the Patek Philippe Aquanaut than a vintage Polo.
One more look at the wide variety of the vintage Piaget style, courtesy of Mendel Watches.
I say this not as a knock to the modern Polo S – it’s a pretty good watch on a rubber strap, a viable alternative to the Aquanaut and so many other rubber-strap or integrated bracelet watches. And I have no doubt it’s experienced some commercial success. But being an alternative to Patek isn’t Piaget’s identity. That’s not what makes Piaget’s watches from the 1970s inherently interesting, when it made stone dials before Patek and everyone else. That’s not the perfectly executed balance between elegance and exuberance or the monthly Piaget Society gatherings at Studio 54 in New York, where Warhol might brush shoulders with Bjorn Borg or Jackie Kennedy or Yves Piaget.
Piaget of the ’70s aspired to more than commercial success, and made others do the same. It aspired to great art, design, music, and sporting achievements. I hope that Piaget is able to recognize this in its own history, and recapture this aspiration in more of its modern watches.
Hodinkee
