Who has seen live how an eight-kilo bar of gold is cast? I certainly haven’t, and it made a lasting impression on me, especially when you realise: this is waste. It is a jewellery and watchmaker of the highest order and in many ways, historically as well as currently, a pioneer of modern watchmaking. It says a lot about a watch manufacture that is, in fact, much more than a watch manufacture. The fact that it exists purely for recycling purposes is all the more impressive. But there is definitely one thing I did not anticipate seeing: its own gold smelter. I had expected all of this from Piaget – as it turns out, this story contains both industrial machines and meadows. And yet, it is not uncommon to blink in astonishment upon arriving at a manufacture, because you are not standing in an industrial area, but rather in front of a mountain, a romantic little forest, or a meadow where cows or, as in this case, sheep are grazing. Watch production is ultimately an industry, and it is often the image of machinery and the smell of lubricating oil that lingers when you leave these buildings. One thing is certain: most real watchmakers have next to nothing to do with the glossy marketing brochures you get from big-name companies in a watch boutique. So how do artists, First Ladies, Hollywood legends and botanists fit together to make the whole picture? For those who are just as curious about this question: welcome to this somewhat different manufacture story from Swisswatches. Even a rose is named after this company: the Yves Piaget rose. Then, there are a number of famous personalities who were all somehow connected to Piaget: Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Jackie Kennedy or Elizabeth Taylor, to name but a few. As the ‘Master of Ultra-thin’, Piaget can boast a number of watch world records, but at the same time, alongside these so-called Altiplano models (named after a desert-like plateau in Peru), there are equally elaborate and crazy jewellery watches. What attracted me most to visiting the Piaget factory in Geneva was my totally fragmented image of the brand, of which I – and I assume many readers feel the same way – essentially knew a few buzzwords. While it is an extreme privilege to have been inside pretty much every Swiss horology house, at some point, a picture automatically forms in one’s mind as to what to expect when visiting yet another manufacture of mechanical watches.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |