About
Special thanks to friend and reader Ori, who lent me his Piaget 15958 for review. Your taste in watches is outmatched only by your generosity.
What makes a watch impressive? Well, it’s complicated. We can award points for many qualities: chronograph functionality, being a perpetual calendar, being a chronograph and a perpetual calendar, having a moonphase indicator, having a minute repeater, et cetera, et cetera. But what about passive characteristics that take active engineering, à la finishing or thinness? And what if a watch is explicitly known for how slender it is? For Piaget, being thin isn’t so much a byproduct as it is the core design directive.
It isn’t a story that Bulgari will tell you, but Piaget was once sole master of the ultra-thin material plane. Founded by Georges-Édouard Piaget in 1874 in La Cote-aux-Fées as a movement manufacturer, the company started off with pocket watch calibers before later switching to wrist watches in 1911. In 1957, Piaget began its ultra-thin journey and dropped the revolutionary 2mm-thick hand-wound Caliber 9P. In 1960, they raised the stakes even higher with the 2.3mm micro-rotor automatic Caliber 12P.
We can credit the brotherly love of Valentin and Gerald Piaget for putting the maison on its current trajectory. G.E’s grandsons opened up the initial Salon Piaget in Geneva in 1959, which became a place for the brand to showcase its jewelry craftsmanship. They also made the critical decision to not sell Piaget’s new movements to competitors and keep their intellectual property close to the vest. The end result? A reputation as the go-to brand for ultra-thin watches cased in precious metal.
The brothers’ decision to double down on ultra-thin coincides with Piaget’s association with American glamour. Elvis Presley, Jackie Kennedy, Andy Warhol, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, you name it; if the name was of some repute, there was a good chance they were wearing Piaget. It is during the 60s that the brand begins smelting its own gold, a process that continues to this day at its foundry in Geneva. We also see Piaget break ground with the landmark use of stone as a dial material. Both of these facts, as well as a deeply expanded product line in jewelry and watch novelties, indicate that Piaget was rapidly metastasizing as a luxury icon.
Piaget’s successes continued well beyond this period, and it was at the tail end of the 70s that they found their “it” factor watch. Heard of the Polo? Piaget’s art-forward sport watch arrived in 1979. It was clothed in yellow gold and came equipped with the ultra-thin Caliber 7P instead of the Beta-21 that Piaget had helped develop as part of a Swiss watch coalition. The concept of a quartz-powered, precious metal watch is a tough sell for most brands (sans Cartier) in today’s day and age. In the twilight of the 70s though? It was elegant and on-trend.
The theme I am trying drive home here is that Piaget’s historical watchmaking contributions are fruitful, but specific in scope. This collecting guide for the original Polo by Tony Traina puts it in perspective: there is just one “complicated” reference in the production table (a triple calendar), and even then it was a limited edition batch of 250 watches. Novelties from Piaget have historically drawn on the use of materials, case shape, and thinness as opposed to complications.
In 1988, Piaget was placed within the umbrella of Vendome Group – today, we know Vendome as luxury juggernaut Richemont. Their acquisition by Vendome coincided with the introduction of several new collections and the end of the Polo by 1990. Of these new groups, the Gouverneur collection (literally meaning “Governor” in French) represented the new upper end of Piaget’s capabilities and would showcase their ability to play in the realm of complications.
All That Turns Gears Is Gold
“Renaissance” feels fitting for the moment. It represents one half of a historical dynamic that all nerds love: anything that is the beginning or end of something. In terms of decades, the 80s and 90s are both – as the Quartz Crisis was abating, mechanical watchmaking was rediscovering its gusto.
This article by A Collected Man does a great job going in-depth on the calendar watches of the era, which represent the complicated upper end of new beginnings for the Swiss. The Holy Trinity was taking their first steps as newfound disciples of Henry Ford – it is during the early 80s that we see perpetual calendars, both ultra-thin and automatic, serially produced in precious metal for the first time. Vacheron’s Patrimony 43031 and Audemars Piguet’s 5548 are the first watches that come to mind (apologies to Patek and the 3940, for whom I am evidently emotionally unavailable).
A Grande Sonnerie in pink gold. This one hammered at a Sotheby’s auction on May 10 this year for 226,800 CHF. Image: Sothebys
We’ve already established that the Gouverneur collection arrived late to the ball, but when it did, it had the necessary stage presence to hang. The collection included multiple models such as a perpetual calendar, chronograph, and even a grande sonnerie by 1996-1997. Piaget’s Grande Sonnerie was objectively special; made in collaboration with a certain (then-unknown) Francois-Paul Journe, this 37mm watch featured the chiming gongs on the dial and mystically packed in a grande sonnerie, petite sonnerie, chime / silence selector, power reserve and a minute repeater. The thickness of its Caliber 1996P? 6.7mm. The entire watch? 12mm. Not too shabby, F.P.
As much as it was an apex predator, the Grande Sonnerie was also a glass cannon. Severely limited in scope as the smallest grande sonnerie ever made, Piaget only produced six out of an intended run of ten. Its rarity made it more suited to the role of harbinger for Swiss boardrooms than profit-driving ambassador of progress. Luckily, the serialized watches in the collection could carry the margin-generating load. I mentioned earlier that those watches counted a perpetual calendar or QP (quantieme perpétuel) among their number, the 15918. The 15918 would have theoretically been the brightest star in Piaget’s showrooms, but riding shotgun next to it was a slightly less complicated and more affordable option in the 15958.
The delta between the 15958 and 15918 is explained by the calendar watch hierarchy. Triple calendars display the day, date, and month but don’t take into account the variable length of months; they need to be adjusted five times a year for February and the four 30-day months. Annual calendars, introduced by Patek in 1996, only need adjustment at the end of February. Perpetual calendars have the most horsepower; they self-correct for all months and leap years, and only need to be adjusted once per century. The 15958 is a complete calendar, which we define as a triple calendar with a moonphase aperture. Unlike the QP, the 15958 has no correcting pushers and the crown sets all timekeeping functions. Slightly pulling the crown out to position one and rotating forward will adjust the moonphase, while rotating backward will adjust the date (31 turns will update the month indicator at 12 o’clock). Conversely, position two lets you set time the old-fashioned way.
Even if it doesn’t top the charts, the 15958 still has the air of an aristocrat; I never thought I would use the cliche “timeless elegance,” but the penny loafer fits here. The dial is made of milky white enamel, and the case material is an 18-karat gold that has aged wonderfully with some slight oxidation. I appreciate that there isn’t a lot of non-functional text – you have “Piaget,” “Automatic,” and “Swiss” on the moonphase subdial and that’s it. All four subdials are recessed and finished with a concentric guilloché pattern (azurage if you’re fancy), and the execution is neatly done at a level you’d expect of Piaget. My only complaint is the lack of a seconds hand and a properly graduated minute track, which makes the precise setting of time on a watch dedicated to the precise tracking of time difficult. Given Piaget’s competitors included visually reserved minute tracks on their own in-period watches, I can’t help but feel Piaget’s “form over function” ethos actually reduced both the form and function of the 15958.
The 15958 wears every bit of delicate but stable; at 33.5mm wide by 37.3mm lug-to-lug with only 8mm of thickness, it is the definition of svelte. The crown is petite, the crystal has no rise above the bezel, and the caseback barely extends below the drop-off of the lugs. The overall footprint is so small that one could naturally assume the movement within must be in-house to achieve it. Surprisingly, one would be wrong. Here we have found a skeleton hidden behind the caseback – this movement is driven by a third party caliber.
The Caliber 8532 is modular, and it borrows its DNA from a well-known, off-the-shelf movement; the triple calendar module is Piaget’s creation, but the attached base is an ETA 2892-A2. ETA marketed the original 2892 in 1975 as a top-end “Flatline” movement. A mere 3.6mm tall, the movement was thin, robust and conducive to modular setups. By virtue of said robustness, it and its successors have been used prolifically as a development base over the years by many brands – think Sinn, Breitling, IWC, Omega, etc. And like many ETA calibers (themselves derived from previous designs by other companies), its spirit dwells in ETA’s competitors: cloned from the 2892’s rib is another movement we often see today in Sellita’s SW300-1.
Piaget using an ETA base in a complicated watch brings forth an ongoing philosophical debate – is a haute horlogerie brand using a mass-produced, non-in-house caliber to execute complications a marriage of convenience or a sordid affair? I suppose neither has a particularly positive connotation, and it exposes just how thin the veneer of heritage-based reputation can be. Vacheron’s 43031 and AP’s 5548 are both modular, as are most calendar watches. However, those two watches also use Jaeger-LeCoultre’s famous Caliber 920 as their base (and the 920 has been used by every member of the Holy Trinity at one point or another for good reason). Thinness aside, the “Watchmaker’s Watchmaker” simply offers a different level of craftsmanship and finishing beyond what ETA can provide. My opinion is that Piaget cost-cutting with an ETA caliber is as perturbing now as it was back then, regardless of the 2892’s notoriety.
Piaget produced the 15958 in a small batch of flavors. Yellow gold is the sole case material, although other Gouverneur models like the small seconds 15968 and 12978 chronograph were offered in platinum in limited quantities. It came in two dial variants: white enamel as photographed in this article as well as a beautiful sunburst champagne. From there, you branch out linguistically and can either speak Italian or seek out a watch with more Anglo-Saxon sensibilities. It goes one layer further with the indices – the pencil-style version is standard, but Piaget also made a rare “pinball” dial that commands a premium.
Piaget’s foray into complications, an area they hadn’t thoroughly explored before the Gouverneur collection, was fleeting. The entire group lasted nigh a decade before they were removed from office in 2000. It was a year that ironically coincided with the reintroduction of the Polo in mechanical format; the Gouverneur collection had both taken power from the Polo and, in the end, ceded it back with the Polo’s return.
Piaget’s Caliber 642P. Images: Piaget
Short-lived as it was, the lasting impact of the Gouverneur calendar watches and Grande Sonnerie was designing Piaget’s blueprint for the future. The past was ultra-thin, and through these watches Piaget was getting ready to add a second superlative in ultra-complicated. The future took some time to get here: the second coming of the collection from 2012 was focused on… ellipses. But in that collection was Piaget’s 4mm-tall Caliber 642P, complete with moonphase and flying tourbillon, that continues to power many of the brand’s tourbillon models even today. When we factor in Piaget’s achievements with the Polo, where there have been perpetual calendars since 2016, it is clear Piaget has leveled up in order to better compete with other luxury competitors.
Nowadays, Piaget is engaged in an ongoing, almost comedic horological conflict over thinness that dates back to 2014. Most recently, it was Bulgari who launched the latest salvo with their 1.85mm-thick Octo Finissimo Ultra Tourbillon; this watch trumped Piaget’s 2mm-thick Altiplano Concept Tourbillon in April for the title of most undernourished gravity tamer. Richard Mille briefly entered the chat with their 1.75mm thick UP-01 in 2022 and Konstantin Chaykin’s prototype ThinKing from 2024 (emphasis on prototype, as Bulgari has the production title) wears the all-encompassing crown at 1.65mm. There are a couple stakeholders here, but it isn’t surprising that Piaget is rhythmically stirring the pot.
Perhaps the march of progress is invariably tied to the erosion of tradition and affordability. Each of the aforementioned watches are objectively modern engineering marvels; they have an almost unthinkable architecture, often using their casebacks as a base plate and rearranging the mechanical guts into as few layers as possible. They consequently look far more avant garde than any watches from the previous era, and their development costs as well as the premium associated with high horology has rendered them unobtainable. Piaget’s Altiplano Ultimate Concept, unveiled in 2018 and previous title holder for thinnest mechanical watch ever, is north of $400,000. The Tourbillon version has “price upon request” sensibilities, but Bulgari’s competitor is priced at around $600,000 to give those who need to ask an approximation.
It isn’t a perfect comparison, as watches with six figure prices were clearly never intended for widespread adoption. A perpetual calendar Polo in steel still costs $62,500 today, however, and highlights why the 80s and 90s shine so much – if you want an affordable, complicated watch that looks good next to a martini, there’s no better era to choose from. Even with limited data, the pricing feels comparatively pedestrian. Vacheron’s 43031 in yellow gold will run you $25,000 to $30,000 USD. AP’s 5548 strikes somewhere in the ballpark of $20,000, and the 5588 day-date is even cheaper. Piaget’s 15918 looks sharper than all three: there is just two listings on Chrono24, but they both clock in around $11,000. And then you get to the true value purchase, the 15958. It isn’t a perpetual like the others, and that ETA base still raises an eyebrow. That’s okay though, because the dollars properly reflect the product: a 15958 starts at $7,000 to $8,000. That’s high horology unlocked for significantly less than the price of a Rolex Submariner at retail.
We’ve come full circle. I want to ask you the same question that kicked off our conversation: what makes a watch impressive?
Specs-wise, the 15958 isn’t some tour de force of engineering or exemplar of perfection. It uses an off-the-shelf base movement, the porthole lacks some key visual creature comforts, and there’s an argument for punching up to perpetual land and adding the extra functionality.
On the opposite side of the coin, maybe the 15958 isn’t dressed in fool’s gold. There’s a karat of analog beauty to be had in owning one: it certainly asks for more user input than a perpetual calendar, but the nature of mechanical watches has always meant the process is part of the reward. There’s also much to be had in savings, too: you get the charm and dignity of a QP, but at a significantly reduced cost. When it comes to calendar watches, the 15958 is gilded proof that you can have an elegant watch with even more elegant economics. For a brand like Piaget, this timekeeper is a deep cut that we can all appreciate.
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