Piaget CEO: ‘You have to do things that are faithful to your DNA’

“Grail watch” is geek speak for the sort of watch you would crawl over broken glass to own. It is a term so overused that it is applied to almost every watch brand. But nobody ever had a grail Piaget — until this year.

The brand has a 150th birthday to celebrate and its reputation for jewellery watches plays nicely into the current trend for men wearing women’s watches. Walking last year’s red carpet in Cannes, The Weeknd wore a diamond-smothered Piaget lady’s watch, which got significantly better reviews than the TV show he was promoting.

But, at Piaget, there is more than anniversary hype and product placement at work. It is impossible to quantify buzz and mood; although the company’s owner Richemont is not keen on giving sales figures for its individual brands, there is the sense that Piaget is really geisting the zeit. This year, its booth at the annual Watches and Wonders fair was so packed it could have done with crowd control; instead there was a cocktail bar, where CEO Benjamin Comar was getting mobbed.

It started with the launch in February of the Polo 79, a 200-gram gold bracelet watch and a painstaking homage to the 1979 original. It was long overdue. “As soon as I arrived at Piaget three years ago, everybody kept asking me to relaunch the Polo,” says Comar, who cultivates what in my youth would have been called designer stubble and has a voice that sounds like Maurice Chevalier with a sore throat.

Comar is a jewellery industry veteran — he started work at Cartier in the early 1990s, moved to Chanel in 2004 as director of fine jewellery and was CEO of Repossi for a couple of years before being lured to Piaget in 2021. “I love Piaget,” he growls gallically. He is hardly going to say anything else, but it sounds like he means it, especially when it comes to one of Piaget’s 15 decades in particular: “I am a child of the ’70s so the brightness of its creativity at that time has a very strong appeal for me.” And he clearly wants to return Piaget to what he sees as its 1970s zenith.

Historically, Piaget was a watchmaker supplying movements to others. It did not sign its own watches until 1943. Jewellery came even later, in 1959. But it made up for lost time. By the early 1970s it was known for design that was futuristic, extravagant and, to use the argot of the era, far out. It was all richly textured gold, polychromatic hard stones and chains — lots of them. Pendants and Sautoir watches on exotically fashioned chains of gold festooned jet-set necks. And it wasn’t just women’s watches: Sammy Davis Jr was a Piaget man, as was Salvador Dalí, who collaborated with the brand on a series of gold bracelet watches.

“They embraced this period in terms of creativity, flamboyance and jet setting: they would send the designer to Paris for fashion week,” says Colmar.

Created either in short series or as unique pieces, this was haute couture for the wrist. Typical is a gorgeously impractical woman’s cuff watch from 1974, which had a tasselled fringe of gold tendrils ending with a bead of coral. “Piaget always played on this synergy, this relationship between jewellery and watches,” Comar continues. But in the 21st century this delicate balance of jewellery and watchmaking makes Piaget tricky for him to handle. Few jewellers are equally well known for watches and vice versa: the exception to the rule is Cartier.

For Comar, stylistic consistency is key. Historically, Piaget had separate creative directors for watches and jewellery, but since 2017, Stéphanie Sivrière has been in charge of both. “She has been in the company for 23 years. She oversees the entire collection and, in recent years, the connection between watches and jewellery has become stronger,” says Comar. This is illustrated by last year’s relaunch of the jewellery Sautoir watches, which debuted in 1969.

“When I work on a collection, I mix watch designers and jewellery designers,” explains Sivrière, of how she captures what she calls “l’état d’esprit of the ’70s: hedonism, freedom and a sense of elegant audacity”. As an example, she shows me the designs for a necklace of gradient tourmaline that seems to have been tie-dyed.

Sivrière is particularly keen to use the 150th anniversary collection to show Piaget’s “savoir faire of the chain”. Once you know that, you see it everywhere: links of different types and texture, with sometimes three or four different styles of chainwork in a single piece, embellished with both precious and semi-precious stones. She is not dismissive of diamonds and emeralds, but I sense that she feels the uniformity of colour and clarity can get a little dull. “For me, hard stone is the patrimony of Piaget. You get so many different colours in a single opal,” she marvels. At Piaget the hard stone is often the star and the gemstone just an accent: one of the most memorable watches this year is the Andy Warhol (the American pop artist was a fan), the vintage version of which has a dial of fossilised wood, baguette-cut emerald hour markers and more emeralds on the TV screen style bezel.

The rebirth of the Warhol has been another highlight of Comar’s stewardship. The style, although long available in turquoise, malachite and onyx, was a sleeper until last year when “a collector walked into the Monte Carlo boutique and ordered 10 Andy Warhols with different hard stones. We put them on show at Watches and Wonders last year and suddenly we had crazy numbers of special orders”, says Comar. The current wait list is about a year long.

Comar contends that the current reawakening of interest in Piaget is about more than nostalgia for legacy watches. “There is a ’70s and ’80s mood, but I don’t like the word vintage.” Instead, he feels that there is a cultural shift that favours Piaget.

“People are more and more knowledgeable about jewellery and watches. They’re more cultured and more interested in creativity. I’m not keen on saying something is for a specific generation. But young people know much more about jewellery and watches than my generation did at that age. They’re not fooled,” says Comar. “There is a backlash if you do things that are too targeted or appear too marketed. You have to do things that are faithful to your DNA.”