Piaget was founded in 1874 in the village of La Côte-aux-Fées, in the Swiss Jura, by Georges-Édouard Piaget, who was nineteen years old and set up a workshop on the family farm to make lever escapements and other movement components for other people’s watches. For the first sixty-nine years of its existence the Piaget name barely appeared on a dial, because the company was a supplier, quietly building movements that ended up inside watches by Cartier, Rolex, Ulysse Nardin, and Bulgari. That changed in 1943, when the founder’s grandsons registered Piaget as a trademark, and in 1957 and 1960 the company produced the Calibre 9P and Calibre 12P, the thinnest hand-wound and thinnest automatic movements in the world at the time. It has been part of the Richemont group since 1988, and in 2024 it celebrated its 150th anniversary.
The family workshop
Georges-Édouard Piaget made parts, not watches, and he made them well enough that by 1911 his son Timothée could take over the family firm and turn timepieces into a full-time business instead of a winter sideline for farmers. Even then the family stayed in the background: their movements went out the door unsigned and came back inside other companies’ cases, which is the kind of arrangement that keeps a workshop solvent and a name obscure. The third generation finally decided the name was worth something. In 1943 Gérald and Valentin Piaget, the founder’s grandsons, registered the Piaget brand as a trademark, and two years later they built a larger manufacture in La Côte-aux-Fées to produce their own signed watches. The family motto, supposedly engraved on the casebacks, was “always do better than necessary,” which is an admirably Swiss sentiment and also exactly the kind of thing you would say about people who spent three generations obsessing over escapements before anyone knew their names.
The ultra-thin era
Valentin Piaget was the one who decided thinness would be the signature, and in 1957 he unveiled the hand-wound Calibre 9P at the Basel Fair. It was 2 mm thick, one of the thinnest mechanical movements in the world, and Piaget used it only in gold cases, which told you everything about where the company saw itself. Three years later came the Calibre 12P, an automatic just 2.3 mm thick with an off-center micro-rotor made of 24-karat gold, dense enough to wind the barrel despite its size. It was the world’s thinnest self-winding movement, and it is still the foundation of the company’s reputation: the Altiplano dress watch line, built around the dial openings these movements made possible, traces directly back to the 9P. (I learned about the 12P the way I learn most things in this hobby, which is to see a photograph of something impossibly delicate and then spend an hour reading about it instead of doing whatever I was supposed to be doing.)
A late-1980s Piaget Altiplano, the dress line born from the ultra-thin movements. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The jet-set years
In 1959 Piaget opened its first Geneva salon and started showing jewelry alongside the watches, which is when the company’s second identity really began. Geneva became the home of its goldsmithing and gem-setting workshops, and in 1963 Valentin told his designers to do what had never been done before, which produced the first watches with ornamental hardstone dials: turquoise, lapis, coral, malachite, sliced into watch dials like something out of a geologist’s fever dream. The clientele followed: Jackie Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Andy Warhol, Roger Moore, Elvis Presley. Salvador Dalí designed a coin watch with the company in 1967. The 1973 Limelight Gala, with its oval case and lugs that flowed asymmetrically over the dial, pushed the jewelry-watch fusion even further. All of this was overseen, eventually, by Yves G. Piaget, the fourth generation, who took the presidency in 1980 and understood better than anyone before him that in the 1970s, a watch was becoming an accessory for the beautiful people, and there was no shame in making the most beautiful one.
1979: the Polo
Yves Piaget designed the Polo himself in 1979, and it was Piaget’s answer to the integrated-bracelet sports-luxe wave of the decade: a watch where the case, dial, hands, and bracelet were all yellow gold, finished in alternating matte and polished gadroon stripes, looking like a jewelry bracelet that happened to tell the time. Inside was the Calibre 7P quartz movement, 3.1 mm thick, the thinnest quartz movement in the world at the time, with a genuinely clever trick: the hour hand could be reset independently without disturbing the minutes, for the jet-setters who changed time zones the way the rest of us change socks. Piaget was early and enthusiastic on quartz, which reached 65 percent of production by the end of the 1970s, though the company never dropped mechanical entirely. In 1985 Yves sent his own polo team riding down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to promote the watch, which remains one of the great stunts in watch marketing history. Then, in 1988, he sold the family firm. Cartier acquired Piaget and Baume & Mercier that year, and the company joined the Vendôme Luxury Group, which became the Richemont group we know today.
The Richemont years
Under Richemont, Piaget kept both of its personalities running in parallel. The 1990s brought the Possession jewelry line (launched 1990), more Limelight watches, and Miss Protocole with its interchangeable straps. In 2001 the company opened a Haute Horlogerie manufacture in Plan-les-Ouates outside Geneva, gathering watchmaking and jewelry crafts under one roof while the movements continued to be made at La Côte-aux-Fées, and in 2002 it produced the Calibre 600P tourbillon, 3.5 mm thick, the thinnest tourbillon in the world. The Polo got revived twice: in 2001 as an all-gold watch with a mechanical self-winding movement, in 2009 as the oversized Polo FortyFive, and then in 2016 as the Polo S, the first Polo ever made in stainless steel, with a cushion-shaped case inside a round bezel. The redesign was a clear bid for the luxury sports-watch mainstream, and it worked commercially, though it drew the obvious comparisons to certain famous integrated-bracelet watches from Geneva and one detail raised eyebrows: instead of a Piaget ultra-thin caliber, the Polo S ran a modified Cartier 1904 movement borrowed from its Richemont stablemate. Piaget celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2024, and today the lineup runs from the Altiplano dress watches to high-jewelry pieces to the Polo in its many forms, including a perpetual calendar version.
The Polo S, the steel luxury-sports reboot introduced in 2016. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Why it matters
Piaget is one of those brands that different people know for completely different reasons, and both reasons are legitimate. To most of the world it is a jewelry house that makes pretty watches, the kind of brand your aunt who knows about such things would mention in the same breath as Cartier. To watch people it is the manufacture that built the thinnest movements of its generation and never really stopped, the 9P and 12P standing as genuine landmarks in the craft. The honest version is that both are true at the same time, and the company has spent decades managing the tension between them rather than resolving it. Give credit where it is due: the ultra-thin watchmaking is real, the stone dials and goldsmithing of the 1960s and 70s were genuinely daring, and the vintage gold pieces from the jet-set era have a warmth that the current catalog sometimes struggles to recapture. The Polo S episode is worth being clear-eyed about: a fine commercial move, a watch that looks like what it is trying to compete with, and a movement borrowed from the sister brand down the hall. And the current catalog leans heavily on the jewelry side of the identity, which is where the money is, even if it means the watchmaking brilliance occasionally plays second fiddle to the gemstones. None of that changes the central fact. A nineteen-year-old on a farm in the Jura built a workshop that, 150 years later, still makes some of the most refined thin movements on earth, and that is a better track record than most companies in any industry get to claim.
Official site: piaget.com
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