After its 150th anniversary last year, Piaget continues tracing its rich heritage with a cult design from the late 1960s inspiring a new family of watches.
The 21st Century collection, presented at the annual Basel Fair in 1969, included flamboyant gold-chain sautoirs with pendant watches, as a new and stylish way to wear the time.
Piaget's futuristic design project even included a silhouette similar to the Trapeze designed by Yves Saint Laurent for Christian Dior in 1958.
Half way through the third decade of the 21st century, the Maison of Extraleganza has reinvented its trapeze style for the Sixtie collection, unveiled at Watches and Wonders Geneva 2025.
The name of the new range can be associated with time, as 60 seconds make a minute and 60 minutes equal an hour.
More significantly, it is a nod to the 1960s, when third-generation Valentin and Gerald Piaget ran the family business with the latter's son Yves joining forces.
Valentin masterminded the development of ultra-thin movements and launched Piaget's first high jewellery collection in the previous decade.
Sarocha Chankimha with the new Sixtie.
In the late 1960s, his vision for jewellery watches spurred the establishment of Piaget's Creative Studio, whose designers were sent to Paris to observe trends from runway shows and generate ideas for watches and jewellery that would complement couture.
The team, which included seminal watch designer Jean-Claude Gueit, often sketched onto pages torn from fashion magazines. Consequently, their designs materialised as openwork cuffs, long swinging sautoirs, hand-textured gold bracelets and other audacious pieces.
Through the resulting 21st Century collection, Piaget transformed a timepiece from a functional accessory to a design-driven, fashion-forward object.
Moreover, the cases and dials deviated from being round, illustrating the maison's Play Of Shapes design code. The disruptive designs, for instance, featured ovals, rectangles of startling proportions and the arresting trapeze shape.
Yves Piaget launched this avant-garde collection, which embodied his vision that a Piaget watch is first and foremost a piece of jewellery.
In the 1970s, the Play Of Shapes concept was expressed by jewellery watches that could be square, octagonal, hexagonal or the signature trapeze as well as a combination such as a square mingling with a circle or an oval elongated into an ellipse.
Piaget's global ambassador Nattawin Wattanagitiphat.
In 2025, the offbeat style returns as the Sixtie jewellery watches, whose shape uniquely appears to shift between trapeze, square, round or cushion while the supple bracelet echoes with trapezoidal links.
The gadroons of the bezel recall the chiselled lines of the Piaget 14101 quartz model from the 1970s.
The bracelet and bezel particularly highlight the maison's goldsmithing craftsmanship cultivated at Les Ateliers de l'Extraordinaire located in Plan-les-Ouates, on the outskirts of Geneva.
Other design elements include baton hands, hour markers, Roman numerals and a Piaget logo at 3 o'clock on the satin-finished dial.
Powered by the Piaget 57P quartz movement, the Sixtie debuts in steel, rose gold or a combination of both materials as well as diamond-set versions.
Global ambassador Nattawin "Apo" Wattanagitiphat sported a rose-gold Sixtie at the Play of Shapes dinner held recently at Waldorf Astoria Bangkok's Champagne Bar.
While designed for women with a diameter of 29mm and 25.3mm, the dashing Thai actor showed how men can express themselves through smaller rather than oversized models.
Diamond-set versions of Piaget's trapeze-shaped timepiece.
The bracelet and bezel particularly highlight goldsmithing craftsmanship.
The bracelet and bezel particularly highlight goldsmithing craftsmanship.
The bracelet and bezel particularly highlight goldsmithing craftsmanship.
