All that Glitters: Piaget Gold Bracelet

‘‘Polished, engraved, cabled and adorned with countless motifs: gold is protean by nature and lends itself admirably to the dexterity of Piaget artisans who sculpt it like a ray of sun.”

Sculpted like a ray of sun … seldom has marketing-speak been as lyrical as in this vintage advertisement from the 1970s.

For many years Piaget made gold watches, hence the slogan, “Piaget time—measured only in gold!”, and Piaget’s passion for the precious metal can be traced back to 1961, when it acquired its very first gold-smithing workshops.

I have long had a weakness for vintage Piaget watches from the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. One of the defining characteristics of the maison at this point in time was its focus on the creation of watches with gold bracelets of magical suppleness and miraculous textures, for both men and women.

Former designer Jean-Claude Gueit recalls how at the time Valentin Piaget used to judge the quality of a design: “He would pick up the watch and pass his hand over it, then he would say, ‘It feels nice to the touch, it’s good, it will make a great watch.’” This tactile, sensuous, braille-like quality would come to define the pinnacle of Piaget’s art.

Mesh-like, woven, hammered, chased, decorated, cabled, rigid, flexible, extravagant, chaste…whatever your taste, provided you liked gold, there was a Piaget bracelet watch for you. Beginning with a gold wire wrapped around a mandrel, Piaget’s artisans created wonders. Most famous is the Milanais bracelet, for which spirals of gold are wound into one another, then pressed to create a woven structure. Similar, but featuring gold spirals wound in opposite directions and then held together with pins, the Polonais can yield a variety of effects that can resemble the cable knit of a pullover.

And then there are creations so sui generis that they can only be likened to the creations of couturiers and are described in the Piaget archives simply as “assembled chains”: mixtures of polished and twisted gold rings, watch straps resembling chainmail or mesh that drape over the wrist. These wonderful, textured, shimmering creations begin life at the artisan’s bench as lacklustre lengths of gold wire and undergo an almost magical transformation at the hands of the chaîniste.

In recent decades, there has been less emphasis placed upon them, but these skills never disappeared entirely, due in part to Michel Grantcola, a now-retired chaîniste who kept a box—a treasure chest, really—filled with fragments of various bracelets and chains, which colleagues would consult for inspiration. Some time ago, I spent a very happy hour rummaging through its contents marvelling at bits of watch bracelets that resembled, among other things, large gold figures of eight linked together and chevroned ribbons of cashmere-smooth gold.

Happily, the pendulum of fashion has now swung back towards the chaîniste. In 2014, the Extremely Piaget collection revived the cuff watch—a more politically correct renaming of the “slave” bangle watches of the early 1970s. And last year, a collection of cuff watches, entitled Sunlight Journey, was launched to showcase hand engraving in styles that resembled raw silk and sunbursts.

It was also in 2014 that Piaget brought back a signature technique from the 1960s called “palace” decoration; in which a bracelet composed of small flat links, assembled very tightly and held together with pins, is engraved by hand. The effect is extraordinary: it feels like the bark of a tree, but handles like silk.

The most famous “palace” engraved watch was owned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and featured an oval jade dial surrounded by diamonds and tourmalines. The sight and the touch of it revives for me the intoxicating glamour of a time when the term “jet set” was used un-ironically. Thus, I was particularly glad to see that at this year’s SIHH, Piaget decided to make 2018 its year of the bracelet, with a range of watches fastened to the wrist by ribbons of gold with textures mimicking fur, frost and wood.

Alas, it pains me to say that Piaget have made a slight mistake: for some reason these watches are made only for women, whereas in the golden years these watches evoke, men wore bracelet watches, too. I do hope that CEO Chabi Nouri will take note and address this deficiency.