Piaget is celebrating its 140th anniversary in style including a glittering participation at the Biennale des Antiquaires this fall where it will show distinctive examples of its hallmark carefree style from the 1960s-1970s when the brand was under the leadership of Yves Piaget and designer Jean-Claude Gueit with flamboyant cuff watches, gold link bracelets, and dials with hard stones. “Extremely Piaget,” the new collection especially created for the event, comprises 37 watches and 88 jewelry pieces characterized by bold designs playing on asymmetry, stylization, and fluidity as well as freedom of movement. On some pieces, the boundaries between jewelry and watch disappear completely: an ornate cuff with interlacing diamond motifs coiling around an oval sapphire or emerald, engraved with floral motifs, hide a watch dial, while long sautoir necklaces made of gold and adorned with lapis lazuli or turquoise medallions can incorporate a tiny oval-shaped watch module.

Color, a house signature, is used strongly with a mix of precious stones (emerald, sapphire) and hard stones (turquoise, opal, heart of ruby, Laipis Lazuli, and onyx. Watch out for the beautiful watch series based on a design worn by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis in the 1960s. The small, elegant, oval watch with a stone dial and a glittering bezel is fitted with a very supple bracelet made from a gold mesh adorned with a ‘palace’ décor that makes it look like an iridescent ribbon of wild silk and showcases the company’s goldsmithing know-how. Several cuff watches in this collection feature hammered gold techniques, while cabled gold is also used for sautoir necklace creations and some rings.

Another theme of the collection is “Extremely Sparkling,” with pieces featuring a profusion of marquise-cut diamonds. One of the stars of the collection is a necklace of marquise-cut diamonds framing two emeralds.

Piaget is using different setting techniques, one that it perfected in the 1960s and is known as “jupon” or petticoat setting which it uses with baguette-cut diamonds that are held by prongs and arranged in one or two rows to create the appearance of a moving fabric. This is one of the rare brand now still doing this setting, which has been taken to an extreme this year with the creation of a ring.#

Meanwhile, a col ‘Claudine’ (Peter Pan) diamond sautoir watch has also been created with each chaton (or stone setting) designed especially for the stone that surrounds it and connected to the next by a very delicate link. This technique allows the jeweler to use markedly different diamond cuts on the same piece, while highlighting each stone

As first published on BlouinArtinfo.com