Piaget Houses Its Record-Setting Ultra-Thin Minute Repeater in Contemporary Polo Case

Piaget has launched its new Piaget Polo Minute Repeater, a high-complication sports watch that puts its intricate mechanics on show through a partially openworked dial. The watch builds on the maison’s long history of ultra-thin watchmaking as well as its previous work with minute repeaters. In 2013, Piaget introduced the world’s thinnest minute repeater in the Piaget Polo Emperador case, and this latest model brings channels that into the contemporary Polo collection, keeping the line’s distinctive shape-in-a-shape design. The piece is centred around the calibre 1290P, which is developed, finished and assembled at Piaget’s La Côte-aux-Fées Manufacture. Here, its 430 components receive extensive hand finishing, including bevelled bridges, a guilloché mainplate and mirror-polished minute-repeater hammers, while a blue PVD-coated platinum micro-rotor provides the winding power. In signature Piaget fashion, design is equally as important as the technicalities. Made from gold and finished with hand guilloché, the dial features a blue sapphire element that reveals the minute repeater’s regulator, while sections of the mechanism can be seen beneath the gold fillet. The 48mm white-gold case is just 9.30mm thick, an impressive proportion for a chiming watch – and even more tip-of-the-hat-worthy is the fact that it’s water resistant up to 30 metres. Arriving on a blue calfskin strap, th

Piaget has long built its watchmaking reputation on a combination of ultra-thin movements and decorative techniques. Founded in 1874 by Georges-Édouard Piaget in La Côte-aux-Fées, the Maison developed its expertise in high-precision movements before making ultra-thin mechanical calibres one of its defining specialities. This expertise has also extended to major complications, including the tourbillon , chronograph , perpetual calendar and minute repeater. Now, Piaget brings back the chiming mechanism, previously featured in the Emperador Coussin Automatic Minute Repeater , to its modern sport-chic collection with the new Piaget Polo Minute Repeater. The new Piaget Polo Minute Repeater is presented in a 48mm white gold case with a rhodium finish, measuring 9.3mm in height, almost identical in size and shape to the watch that was once called the Emperador Coussin . The repeater is activated by the slide positioned at 9 o’clock, and the case is water-resistant to 30m. The dial brings together mechanics and decorative craftsmanship. Made of white gold, it is openworked and hand-guilloché, with blue PVD accents and a distinctive blue sapphire ring. A shaped aperture reveals parts of the movement beneath, and the sapphire ring at 4 o’clock bears the inscription “La Côte-aux-Fées” and frames the visible inertia wheel, the dedicated regulator of the minute repeater. The watch is powere

More than a decade after unveiling its first in-house minute repeater, Piaget has revived the once-record-setting calibre in a familiar-looking guise. The new Polo Minute Repeater pairs the ultra-thin, micro-rotor cal. 1209P with the modern Polo case and a striking, partially open-worked guilloche dial. The Polo Minute Repeater is a new watch, but it bears a striking resemblance to the Emperador Coussin of 2013. This isn’t that surprising, since the contemporary Polo — refreshed in 2016 — borrows significantly from the Emperador’s case design. But in this case the similarity is more than skin deep, since the Polo Minute Repeater shares the same movement as its predecessor: the cal. 1209P. This ultra-thin calibre was once the world’s thinnest minute repeater — a title it maintained for three years before the launch of the Bulgari BVL 362, based on a 1980s Gerald Genta calibre. The Polo is big but flat, measuring 48 mm wide but just 9.3 mm thick. The size is partly due to the movement construction, which spreads out the major component groups into two slim planes with the escapement, micro-rotor, and twin minute repeater hammers on on one level, and the racks and centripetal governor on top. This 2010s-era sizing is arguably out of step with current fads where small watches are all the rage, but the watch is elegant and evokes 1970s “jumbo” watches with its wide-but-flat profile.