The luxury watch business is built on nostalgia. Brands duke it out over who invented which internal mechanism when, and in the case of two venerable Swiss companies – Vacheron Constantin and Blancpain – who can claim to be the very, very oldest. The Sixties and Seventies proved to be the imperial period for watch design – the era of the Rolex SeaDweller, the Omega Speedmaster and the Tag Heuer Monaco – one still being mined 60 years later, with reissue after reissue. The retro trend has moved along a smidge recently, with “new” old watches like Cartier’s Pasha De Cartier and Breitling’s Chronomat – designs that originated in the Eighties – getting relaunched last year.
Another storied Swiss brand, Piaget, also went big in the Eighties, with its gold Polo “sports” watch, the ultimate lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous wristwatch. Launched in 1979, it weighed the same as a cricket ball, was powered by a then-prestigious quartz movement and went on to account for the third of Piaget’s sales.
The Polo has continued to be part of the company’s collection ever since, getting a refresh in 2016 with the introduction of the Piaget Polo S line, a more modern, more youthful steel version of the original. (The S stood for ‘steel’, ‘style’ and ‘signature’ of the brand).
For its new Polo Piaget has gone back – not to the solid gold Eighties but to the skinny Seventies when it introduced skeleton watches and first won awards for its super-thin engineering, incorporating various complications from tourbillons to moon phase displays. It was a quest for thinness that culminated in 2018 with the unveiling of the Altiplano Ultimate Concept, a 2mm watch that cost six figures when it eventually went to market two years later. A mad horological experiment.
In keeping with those designs the new Piaget Polo Skeleton puts its intricate mechanical inner workings on display (no quartz here) and comes in two designs, one with a movement in bright blue PVD, the other in slate grey. The case is 30 per cent thinner than existing versions, no small achievement – the movement is just 2.4mm thick.
It won’t be for everyone. It’s a sports watch you probably wouldn’t want to play sport in. But there is nothing nostalgic about the new Polo – it’s a feat of high-wire engineering that would have seemed like science fiction in the Eighties.
£26,500; piaget.com
