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The final installment of a cycle that began in 2024 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the house, Colours of Extraleganza features 65 creations where ornamental stones take center stage.
The starting point isn’t a gemstone. It’s a watch movement. In 1957, Piaget introduced the 9P caliber, barely two millimeters thick—thin enough to free up space on the dial to set ornamental stones: lapis lazuli, malachite, turquoise, tiger’s eye. What was then an isolated technical feat has become, seventy years later, the guiding thread of an entire trilogy of high jewelry. Colours of Extraleganza, unveiled in mid-June at the Villa Cypris, is its final act.
A trilogy in three parts
Essence of Extraleganza , in 2024, set the stage for the 150th anniversary: revisiting the period when Yves Piaget rubbed shoulders with Dalí and Warhol, and when the workshops produced pieces the market wasn’t expecting. Shapes of Extraleganza, the following year, pushed the boundaries towards pure design—jasper, chrysoprase, sodalite, materials that high jewelry usually regards with condescension. Color remained, and it is Stéphanie Sivrière, artistic director, who provides the key: what matters here is not the stone itself but the energy it generates in contact with another. A colorist’s logic, not a gemologist’s.
Blue Illusions, 900 hours and an optical bias
The Blue Illusions necklace embodies this concept. It features an 8.52-carat cushion-cut sapphire from Madagascar, a 3.30-carat Paraíba tourmaline, and a 13.98-carat Australian black opal—the latter providing the link, its blue-green flashes absorbing and redistributing the tones of the other two stones. The geometric white gold trellis that frames the pendant, composed of custom-cut sapphires and baguette tourmalines, creates an almost fluid effect. The necklace is available in two wearable versions. Two rings and two pairs of earrings complete the set.
The 1969 jumper, 2026 version
Flamboyant Links takes a new direction. The piece revisits the sautoir-watch that the house presented in 1969 in its 21st Century Collection, but reconstructs it around rose gold links and tiger’s eye—a combination abandoned since the 1970s. A 4.13-carat cushion-cut mandarin garnet adds warmth to the design. The sautoir can also be worn as a choker or as a wristwatch. At Piaget, convertibleness has never been a marketing ploy but rather a construction principle inherited from the workshops of the past.
Memphis, fluting and orange aventurine
The Gems Pop set, on the other hand, takes a more direct approach. Inspired by the Memphis collective, it combines spessartine, aventurine, pink sapphire, and thulite in a deliberately pop palette. The dial of the sautoir-watch is made of orange aventurine. The pendant detaches to become a table clock. Gold Swirl, meanwhile, marks a precedent: the gadroon motif, a signature of the house in watchmaking, makes its debut in high jewelry, on a sautoir alternating cabochons of fire opal and indicolite tourmalines between oblong links in rose gold. The accompanying cuff bracelet treats gold as a supple, almost textile-like material.