Fly me, to the Moonphase
For more than a century, Piaget has built its reputation on the Maison's expertise in putting precision in service of beauty, freeing up as much room as possible for the latter.
Ultra-thin movements, combined with hard stone dials, enabled for a significant increase in creativity and elegance beginning in the 1960s. The year 1998 saw the completion of the spectacular marriage of craft and elegance with the introduction of the Altiplano watch.
The Maison has been collaborating with artists and maîtres d'art for decades, enabling them to create one-of-a-kind jewellery and timepieces that reflect their individual vision and expertise.
Piaget is starting a new era this year by tackling two of the industry's greatest difficulties head-on: creating works of art that are both aesthetically pleasing and technically flawless. The Altiplano Moonphase brings the moon phase complications to the Altiplano lineup. The four-piece exclusive métiers d'art collection elevates the Maison's decades-long collaboration with master artists to a new level of savoir-faire and inventiveness.
The four Métiers d'art Altiplano Moonphase watches are a luxury of intricate details and technicality, all squeezed into a 36mm wide timepiece, and are a work of sheer beauty and precision. After two years of research and development, their gauges finally came to life. Chinese constellations are depicted by tiny white dots and valuable stones on a translucent blue enamel sky crafted by master enameller Anita Porchet. Each Guardian, representing a cardinal point and linked with one of the four seasons and elements, quietly appears at night because Piaget enjoys toying with surprising designs and original features. Whereas the red bird, representing the south, is near to summer and fire, the azure dragon, representing the east, is associated with spring and wood. The Westward-facing white tiger is inherently at ease with Autumn and metal, while the Northward-facing black turtle enjoys Winter and water.
Creative designs that adorn the Altiplano's dial had to be crafted on an infinitesimally tiny scale in order to preserve the watch's extraordinary thinness aesthetics. When it comes to the Altiplano's intricate machinery, only the most skilled engravers will do.
A beautiful story of elegance and creative prowess, told under a star-lit sky.
A starry sky illuminates the bottom half of the gold palace-decorated dial, which is set with graduated diamonds, sapphires, and garnets. A labor-intensive masterpiece that shines thanks to countless small details: an oscillating weight in the form of a blue-lacquered moon, a moon window framed in a crescent of gold and diamonds of varying sizes and shapes, etc. Piaget's mastery serves the profound meaning of the constellations' powers and the Moon's endless radiance in each of these works.
Discover the Altiplano Watches: Piaget.com
