Piaget made its first foray into jewellery watches in the 1960s, and the Limelight Gala perfectly depicts the maison's timeless blend of history and innovation
When he founded his first watchmaking workshop in La Côte-aux-Fées, a small village in the Swiss Jura mountains, in 1874, Georges-Édouard Piaget adopted the motto “Always do better than necessary.”
In the 1920s, Georges-Édouard’s son Timothée Piaget ambitiously advanced the philosophy, evolving the family company from primarily a maker of movements to a full-fledged manufacture, celebrated for creating some of Switzerland’s finest luxury pocket watches and wristwatches.
Under the guidance of the third generation in the Piaget clan, Gérald and Valentin, the brand began to find an enthusiastic global audience and commenced cementing a reputation for innovative ultra-thin movements.
In 1957, the same year that the ground-breaking mechanical hand-wound movement calibre 9P shocked and awed attendees of the Basel watch fair with its incredible 2mm slenderness (making it one of the slimmest mechanical movement to have been made), Piaget committed to only working with precious metals—gold and platinum.
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The step was taken in order to ensure the cases of the manufacture’s watches were of equal quality and nobility to the movements within. Thanks to this commitment, over the subsequent decades, a peerless pedigree in goldsmithing expertise and design savoir-faire has crystallised at the manufacture.
In 1960, Piaget launched the 2.3mm-thick (or perhaps, we should more accurately say, 2.3mm-thin) 12P self-winding mechanical movement—yet another demonstration of the house’s finesse and technical innovation.
The Swinging Sixties and glamorous seventies were a fabulous era for Piaget, the house’s lavish aesthetic, svelte lines and sense of inventive modernity truly a perfect fit for the times.
Piaget had already made fully diamond-paved watches a trademark, developing an unparalleled expertise in gem-setting. Pushing his designers further in the early sixties, Valentin Piaget decreed, “Do what has never been done before.”
They responded by launching the first watches to feature dials made of ornamental stone, as well as audacious materials such as peacock feather. Icons of the day, including Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Andy Warhol and Salvador Dalí, championed the brand’s jewellery and timepieces.
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