Welcome to Dialed In, Esquire's regular column bringing you horological happenings and the most essential news from the watch world.
For the first act in celebrating its 150th year in business, Piaget chose to revisit its funky, chunky Piaget Polo, a watch that typified the bold aesthetic that sports watches from high watchmaking houses adopted in the 1970s and in which Piaget was a leader. It wasn’t always so.
Polo, both the sport and the lifestyle around it, inspired Yves Piaget to launch the Polo in 1979. The first iteration was 34mm in diameter and driven by an in-house, ultra-thin quartz movement at the height of the craze for quartz. Even with the lighter movement, it weighed in at more than 130 grams thanks to all that gold. If ever a watch was a product of its time, the Polo was it. And, given the recent interest in the ‘70s and ‘80s in style terms, watchmakers are leaning into a period of their past that has been oddly neglected in the intervening years.
The celebration watch is called the Piaget Polo 79, in homage to that first watch. Like the original, it comes in 18 karat gold, but is sized up to a respectable 38mm to suit every possible customer. Inside of course beats not quartz but a mechanical, in-house Piaget 1200P1 ultra-thin movement.
For almost the first 100 years of its history, Piaget had been a movement specialist. In the late 1940s, the family began to create complete watches, but it was only in the 1960’s that it began to create ornamental watches with the decidedly and unashamedly glamorous vibe its known for today. Piaget’s output was usually done up in precious metals and often with exotic, semi-precious stone dials. Shy and retiring it was not.
There has always been a market in watches for glamor of this caliber, especially when paired with high-end expertise in movements. For Piaget, the slinky gold dress watch was fun, and it quickly became synonymous with the high life and attracted stars like Elvis Presley, Andy Warhol, and Elizabeth Taylor. In the ‘70s as that glamor began to seep into sports watches too, Piaget hit its purple patch. It just hit it again.
