Vintage Piaget Watches Have Never Been Hotter. Here’s What You Need to Know.

To get a better sense of how to start going about collecting vintage Piaget watches, Robb Report ’s watch and jewelry editor, Paige Reddinger , and I sat down with vintage watch expert James Lamdin of Analog:Shift . Analog:Shift has an impressive Piaget selection on offer, and those are the watches we photographed and include here.

Noah Lyles Rocked an Omega Speedmaster While Taking Gold in the 100-Meter Olympic Sprint

Piaget and the Small Watch Moment

Last year, just months before Piaget stirred up an enormous buzz by bringing back the Polo 79 , I was eating lunch in Manhattan with a savvy, well-regarded watch collector who told me they were, “going after a lot of Piaget at auction .” As this collector began to rattle off this and that Piaget watch as “a milestone in thin watches ” or “housing one of the most important movements of the 20th century,” it became clear that vintage Piaget watches were both rich in horological history and undervalued. That’s a killer combo for collectability.

Not long after that lunch, Piaget dropped the Polo 79, Usher started rocking tiny gold Piaget watches at big events, and everyone and their watch-loving cousin seemed to be talking about small dress watches with stone dials, which were often Piagets. Reddinger wrote an article about Piaget having a moment , and Robb Report has also noted the trend toward smaller, dressier watches , especially Cartier , and especially its tiny Tank Mini .

“Piaget as a brand is having a moment, but Piaget as an idea is having a huge moment,” Lamdin told Robb Report . “It’s on everyone’s lips. It’s on every collector’s lips, it’s on every new brand’s lips, it’s on every micro brand’s lips. They’re all talking about the influence that Piaget has as a sort of style icon.”

Because watch collecting trends are largely driven by the tastes of men, it’s intriguing that these tiny, jewelry-oriented watches are blowing up. Lamdin told us, “I didn’t expect for men to embrace it the way [they have], which has been really interesting. We had this guy come in last week [and] he was . . . like a six-foot-five, six-foot-six kind of guy. He was tall and built, and he had a very petite partner, and they had a bunch of watches out…and there were some big watches, and there were some Piagets. And I made an assumption there: His and hers. I was wrong. He came back two days later and bought the small lapis Piaget for himself. Awesome. I was like, fuck yeah.”

Given our recent take on watches, fashion, and gender, we happily cheer along with Lamdin here. However, why these small watches are having a moment remains a cultural question without obvious or clear answers.

Piaget Are Design-Forward Watches

When we asked Lamdin why Piaget was having a moment, he echoed some of what we proffered in our own take on shifting horological tastes, as well as men embracing traditionally feminine things like grooming and fashion more generally. In our conversation I noted that there’s a feminine moment going on, evidenced by trends such as pendant necklaces and broaches for men , pink clothing, smaller watches, and that this tendency may have helped Piaget become popular.

Lamdin agreed, but then also told us, “For 35 years the entire collector community has been obsessed with tool watches, the idea of a function-forward instrument, which, generally in our world, comes in the form of a 40-millimeter steel diver or chronograph timing device with some sort of historical romanticism behind it, whether it’s diving or flying or space travel or something adjacent. And the thing about horology is it doesn’t have to just be function-forward. I think that there’s all these sort of incredible niches of design-forward watches,—whether that’s asymmetry, or interesting use of materials and an avant-garde design language—that is putting the sort of beauty of a thing first.”

“Watches don’t actually have to be, dare I say, functional beyond ‘let’s take this idea of a device that captures time and make art out of it,'” he continued. “And I think when you sort of turn the corner on that idea as a collector or as an enthusiast, the world kind of balloons out, and now, all of a sudden, things you never would have considered are captivating.”

Reddinger asked Lamdin, “Why do you think suddenly the watch community—which has traditionally been so into movements and tool watches, or had to go long and deep on the escapement on this Patek Philippe—why are they suddenly embracing design?”

Aspiring First Gentleman Doug Emhoff Needs to Up His Style Game--Here's How

Lamdin replied, “We probably do need to mention Covid, right? And Covid was an interesting time for watches in general. And I think people got bored with the same shit because they weren’t just casually reading the blogs on their lunch breaks. They were consuming it for hours and hours and hours every day. And they learned a lot. People got burned out of the same stuff that they were getting fed over and over and over and over and over. Instagram had a big part of that. [People] were posting a little bit more weird and wacky shit. You know, they became somewhat influential in some way. The algorithms were with them, and all of a sudden, people said, ‘Oh, what’s all that?’ And then I’d like to say a little bit of the Portland, Oregon, effect occurred, which is, ‘we’re going to try and out weird one another.’”

By now, however, Piaget watches aren’t looking quite as weird as they did during the initial wave of revival, which happens naturally as the culture acclimates to the new normal. Piaget is undeniably “in,” so how do we even approach collecting these fascinating little watches?

How to Approach Collecting Piaget Watches

While all this buzz about Piaget watches continues, and prices keep crawling upward (despite the downward trend of the watch market generally), there is a notable dearth of information about vintage Piaget watches. One of the reasons is that, like Vacheron Constantin , Piaget didn’t have a singular hit watch during the 20th century . Brands like Vacheron Constantin and Piaget riffed endlessly on designs, often making just a few of a single iteration and distributing them widely, presumably so that one would not see the same watch where they lived.

Today, the effect of that strategy is that the variety of Piaget watches on offer is somewhat overwhelming. Unlike collecting Rolex or Omega , for example, where one can pick up one of millions of the same mass-produced watch and confidently notch their belt, collecting Piaget requires a keener sense of taste and discretion. The upside is that Piaget collections will pretty much never resemble each other, but the lack of a set formula for building a collection remains a challenge.

We asked Lamdin for advice he’d give to somebody looking to move into Piaget collecting for the first time. Lamdin said, “Probably the same advice I’d give for anything else, which is make sure you’re buying from a trusted source. It’s not uncommon to see refinished dials or replacement dials. It’s not uncommon to get sold a bill of goods on a watch without a functioning mechanism. You know, servicing a [ultra-thin] caliber 9P is not the easiest thing in the world. It’s a very, very small movement. It’s very easy to lose or destroy screws when you’re opening those case backs and the quartz stuff is tricky as well, not always just a battery. You have to rebuild a heat-sink or something, and then you’re in it for three times what you paid for the watch.”

The 9P was the movement around which Piaget first produced its own watches in 1957, seeing off a craze for ultra-thin watches. The 9P was just two mm tall and continues to be regarded by watch collectors with awe.

When we asked Lamdin about certain models that he felt were good to collect, he said, “I personally find myself drawn to anything with the [ultra-thin] 9P [movement], or one of its variants. They made them for ladies. They made them for men. They made them with articulated or woven gold bracelets. They made them on leather straps.”

As always with collecting watches, condition is everything, and Lamdin emphasized this point: “It’s very easy to over polish a gold watch, and the finishing that they were often using can’t easily be brought back. If you have a bark finish, you need a magician to do that. You want to be very careful about bracelet length. And they did a lot of what I guess we could call it integrated bracelets, not Royal Oak style, but [woven precious metal bracelets]. You can’t take a link out. You gotta cut it. Or if it’s too short, game over. Unless somebody adds something. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, but yes, it does get trickier and expensive. I wouldn’t look at that as a reason not to buy one. You just you need to think about the whole concept of these watches as being a little bit more bespoke than something that was off the shelf, even if it was something that was produced in some quantity. There’s X number of these tiger’s eye, 9P, integrated bark bracelet things.”

At this point, Reddinger said, “We need to pull out some watches.” We all agreed that was a great idea, and the watches truly blew us away.

Grand Seiko Just Dropped Two U.S.-Only Limited-Editions--We Wore (and Loved) Them