Golden HOURS

There's never been a more joyful way to combine jewellery and watchmaking than with a Piaget sautoir watch.

- CELINE YAP

The 1960s must have been an especially thrilling year to be a designer at Piaget. This is when the maison introduced jewellery making to its manufacturing repertoire and opened Salon Piaget in Geneva to showcase jewellery alongside watches. Thanks to third-generation company owner Valentin Piaget, the brand began to develop its distinctive style, which blends watch- and jewellery-making with couture trends adapted from the major fashion shows in Paris. Gradually at first, then like wildfire, jewellery watches caught the attention of the glamorous jet-setting crowd of the day. Expressing a completely different energy and design language than the other Swiss houses, Piaget created a new generation of watches that also wore like jewels.

Comments Cynthia Tabet, Piaget's product marketing director: "Piaget is one of the few [legacy] watchmakers with a very strong jewellery know-how. Valentin Piaget often sent his teams of artisan watchmakers and designers to see the couture shows in Paris to get inspired, to integrate finesse and to think of jewellery as a second skin. This is why Piaget is very adept at chain making and gold crafting. The mindset was always to match the technical with the creative."