The sun’s infinite spectrums and inherent joie de vivre have long been a loyal muse for the house of Piaget. Helios’s warm rays dancing off the likes of endless oceans, vast open roads and infinity pools have all inspired the maison, and for 2019, Piaget turned to a desert oasis’s intense hues and sweeping landforms to fire up its high jewellery atelier.
The collection, titled Golden Oasis, is centred on three themes: Play of Lights, Desert Minerals and Native Blooms, with some 10 excellent high jewellery watches in the 80-plus piece collection. Play of Lights is especially rich, paying homage to the sun as it travels from dusk to dawn, illuminating desert landscapes in a range of hues from blazing white-hot to burnt orange and fuchsia. White diamond watches are particularly prominent, most notably in Rising Star, with a 56P quartz movement and the sun embodied by a 2.42ct vivid yellow diamond.
Golden Hour meanwhile is a burst of marquise-cut white and yellow diamonds surrounding a mother of pearl dial, while White Horizons shows off Piaget’s cuff watch savoir-faire in a dazzling asymmetrical white gold number crafted from various cuts including round brilliant and cool triangle and rhomboid shapes. Finally the Glowing Sun oval watch adds a fiery touch with its two cushion-cut Mozambique rubies that top-and-tail a full diamond-set bracelet.
Desert Minerals radiates with raw energy and is an ode to nature’s bounty of the finest precious stones. The range features some of the collection’s best watches, such as the gorgeous Blue Waterfall that took 65 hours to craft. The bezel is a sweeping, asymmetrical gradation of marquise-cut sapphires dressing an oval dial, while the textured white gold bracelet is fashioned from Piaget’s Palace Décor method of painstakingly hammered gold and evoking jagged rocks.
Secret Waters meanwhile also features a Palace Décor bracelet, which rakishly frames a black opal, oval dial that’s partially covered and gem-set. The irreverent design draws the eye to the mesmerising black opal, a stone beloved of Mr Piaget himself, who once said that they “vividly illustrate the richness of the Earth [with its] range of different crystals. The world according to Piaget resembles an opal, composed of various tastes and preferences.”
Native Blooms makes rare gems of the robust, verdant vegetation that thrives in the harsh, barren desert. Secret Oasis is a magnificent hidden watch with delicate diamond fronds shielding a diamond-set dial; featuring 1,188 brilliant-cut and 129 baguette-cut diamonds and a fully openwork underside, light shines supremely through this piece. The Luxuriant Oasis cuff watch achieves the same with its 171 emeralds that took a year to source, and which are meticulously set into three columns that needed 190 hours of work, as a black opal’s blue-green flecks further enhance the design.
And a final note on Vegetal Laces: two watches that fuse Piaget’s longstanding penchant for hard stones and its get-setting expertise. As if the most precious diamonds, malachite here is ingeniously marquise-cut to adorn the watches and, when paired with super thin bracelets, the look is at once vintage and modern – and the epitome Golden Oasis.
“We are not creating something fashionable but something which highlights Piaget’s DNA and which is timeless,” said creative director Stéphanie Sivrière. “The watches feature strong elements of Piaget heritage: asymmetry, marquise-cut, fluidity, ornamental stones and exploring the symbolism of nature and the sun!”
