Piaget’s unveils a new playful High Jewellery collection and reinvents the Maison’s connections to art and design.
Shapes of Extraleganza, delves deep into the daring, shapeshifting, playful elegance that is the essence of the Maison’s unmistakable style. Following last year’s Essence of Extraleganza, this is the second in a trilogy of collections exploring Piaget’s creative roots in the 1960s and 70s, maximising and modernising concepts, pushing boundaries of both design and craftsmanship, challenging preconceptions, reinvigorating the Maison’s original audacity and
bold ingenuity.
Shapes of Extraleganza tells of Piaget’s powerful connection to art and artists, paying homage to the Maison’s celebrated collaborations with Salvador Dali, Arman or famous collectors like Andy Warhol. Collaborations that grew, naturally, out of Yves Piaget’s personal friendships with artists, and the intellectual and artistic luminaries of the day who made up his inner circle, known as the Piaget Society. These collaborations, fuelled by Yves Piaget’s vision, together with the inventiveness of the Piaget creative studio, the genius of Jean-Claude Gueit, celebrated watch designer, and the skills of Piaget artisans, elevated the jewel to an entirely new status within the world of art and design. Piaget’s milestone 21st Century Collection of jewellery watches, launched in Basel in 1969, captured the heady ferment of social upheaval, art, design, fashion, architecture, the new freedom of expression of the age. Today, Shapes of Extraleganza pulsates with the same effervescence and exhilaration, revelling in the avant-garde, presenting jewels of striking modernity and cultural relevance, ready to take their place in contemporary art and design.
UNEXPECTED ENCOUNTERS
The 2025 High Jewellery collection in the Extraleganza series deep dives into the Piaget’s heritage. Experimental, unexpected yet with warm echoes of familiarity, Shapes of Extraleganza is a study in form, colour, texture, light and volume, a supremely sophisticated evolution of Piaget’s high-energy play of shapes. Shapes within shapes, squares, triangles, zig zags, waves, circles, interlocked, overlaid, jostling joyfully in sculptural and conceptual, highly stylised compositions that perfectly harmonise fluidity and precision. Through 51 creations, Piaget plays with graphic lines, geometric angles, sliver-like triangles, as well as organic free form shapes and sensual curves, while referencing Pop Art, Op Art, the swirling psychedelic patterns of 70s fashion or the generously rounded, plump contours of 60s design icons. Reflecting the high-low cultural mix that characterised 1970s society, High Jewellery meets Pop Culture.
Each suite of jewels expresses a different artistic expression, each melting time into a perfect intermingling of past and present, history and modernity, and as always spiced with Piaget’s seductive, surprising glimpse into the future. Most set includes a watch, showcasing Piaget’s dual mastery, the perfect balance between High Jewellery and Haute Horlogerie as Piaget fuses exceptional watchmaking, in the form of thrilling complications, with adventurous fashion-forward artistry.
In the same spirit of subversive playfulness, Shapes of Extraleganza mixes and mingles signature Piaget techniques and materials. The ornamental stones first seen on watch dials of the ‘60s are now conjured into the vibrantly hued Op Art-inspired linear mosaics of the Kaleidoscope Lights suite, comprising a dramatic striped collar, long drop banded earrings, ring and watch with a sun-ray-like dial. In a virtuoso performance of lapidary art, a variety of ornamental or minerals stones, including unusual specimens, such as rhodochrosite, sugilite and verdite, have been meticulously carved into curved slices of differing thicknesses and then miraculously fitted in precise striped alignment. The ‘back-to-nature’ movement of the 1970s is channelled through the organic, free-form design of the Flowing Curves suite, the spectacular collection of rare black opals embedded in richly textured hand-hammered white gold, presenting a new goldsmithing technique, from the House of Gold, to add to the famous Decor Palace. The set pays homage to Yves Piaget’s passion for opals, in which, he said, he could see the whole world, “made of different tastes and sensibilities.”
Exquisite gemstones, expertly selected not only for their beauty and rarity but for their artistic contribution to each theme, play a vital role in exuberant compositions of colour, light and shape. Rare and ravishing red and orangy- pink spinels take centre stage in the Wave Illusion suite, inspired by the pop colours, naïve geometric lines and sheer childlike joy of the early 1980s Memphis movement. Radiant sun-yellow sapphires sit at the heart of the candy-coloured Curved Artistry suite, which features a secret ring watch, a Piaget signature from the 1940s. The diamond-paved dial is hidden beneath a translucent cabochon aquamarine. Hypnotic Colombian emeralds ooze glamour and seduction in the Gleaming Shapes and Arty Pop suites. The dazzling swirls that ripple right across the supple bracelets and dials of the two Joyful Twirls cuff watches are alive with the colour and light of artfully pavé-set gems; two shades of moody blue sapphires on one, and flaming spessartite garnets and pink sapphires clashing on the other. The wide bracelets replicate the finesse of silk made possible by both superlative gem-setting and, in a High Jewellery first, Piaget’s ultra-thin self- winding movement.
ART IN MOTION
Finally, delivering the shock of the new, the masterpiece of the collection is Endless Motion – a table clock designed and crafted as a mobile sculpture. Embodying Piaget’s relationship with art and artists, this dynamic masterwork is the ultimate celebration of Piaget’s enduring play of shapes, the daring playfulness that the Maison takes so seriously. For such an innovative, barrier-breaking idea, Piaget commissioned Alex Palenski, French artist, friend of the Maison and maker of mobile sculptures. From this extends the quivering branches of the mobile, each set with an organically shaped ornamental stone, in hues of blue and green to echo the lightning flashes of the black opal. Exuding the energy of Piaget’s rebellious spirit, the sense of constant movement that defines Piaget’s creative force, and choreographing a subtle dance of light and shadow, Endless Motion represents the pinnacle of Extraleganza.
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