Piaget’s “Time Machine” event transported guests in London

Andrew McUtchen

Few brands are claiming this unusual year as their own quite like Piaget. This is not off the back of hyped Watches and Wonders releases. This is not a result of celebrity sightings, or strategically leaked new models. This is purely because the areas that Piaget excelled at in their halcyon era of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ’80s is firmly back in vogue in 2025.

Hard stone dials. Softened square and rounded corner trapeze case shapes. Woven mesh bracelets. Stepped cases. The integration of case and bracelet into a singular, elegant design that blurs the lines between, as Yves Piaget would say, “a bracelet with a watch, or a watch with a bracelet.”

Once again, we have gone back to the past to define the future, and no other brand has had its tomb raided quite as thoroughly as Piaget. All of the above are trends defining this year. The designs of best-selling models in our studio can be called upon for further evidence: Toledano & Chan, Furlan Marri and Baltic are prime candidates, but we shouldn’t forget Serica, and its new Parade, with a 180-degree twist to the Warhol case, and the stepped case.

Therefore, it was with great excitement that we hosted an event in our London Watch Discovery Studio to trace this lineage in real time, and to follow these through lines up to the present day – with a selection of watches just launched at Watches And Wonders 2025. I was thrilled to take a back seat on the hosting duties and to welcome the Heritage Officer of Piaget, Alain Borgeaud, to the space as a co-pilot on the journey. We warmed up by filming the same fly-over for YouTube (will be dropping soon!), and then once again with the well-dressed crowd.

The format was elegantly simple: let’s use the cases around the room to showcase the best of each decade, and then highlight a single breakthrough in those decades. Interspersed among the vintage pieces were modern watches, showing the iterative process that leads to vintage-inspired contemporary design.

For the 1950s, it was the development of the staggeringly slim 9P manually wound movement, which is just 2mm thin. I held up my Snap Fitness gym card as a visual guide. It’s absolutely mind-boggling to think that a movement was engineered in the mid-century at this miniature scale. Alain pointed out the many pieces in the room powered by the 9P.

For the 1960s, it was the 12P automatic movement, yet another big win for slim. At just 2.3mm thin, it would be the slimmest automatic movement on the planet at that time. Alain held up his own wrist to demonstrate this movement cased in a lovely, simple, white gold, time-only dress piece, with a white gold mesh bracelet in absolutely immaculate condition. “One of my many auction buys,” he smiled.

For the 1970s, we welcomed hardstone dials in many variations, festooning more styles of watches in the room than we could call out, and we heralded goldsmithing of the highest order – visible on pieces like the Sautoir necklace watch. This piece of jewellery left such an impression on Scarlett Baker, a VIP and local legend, that she christened her new IG name @scarlinthesautoir. Of course, the iconic Polo 1979 also entered the chat. Alain made the slight caveat that despite its birth year being 1979, the watch really came to prominence in the 1980s.

The 1980s centred around the Polo, which gave me an opportunity to relive some career highlights from my interview with Yves Piaget last year. At the time, I asked Mr Piaget which year he would return to if he had a real time machine. His answer was both definite and immediate: 1982. He did not elaborate terribly much. He just drifted for a beat or two in the video – a dreamy silence that we left in the final version.

And dreamy is the best possible word to close on. It was an evening of dreaming awake. Thank you once again team Piaget once again for bringing this dreamy vision to life in our Discovery Studio.