In this episode of On Time, Lex Borrero sits down with Piaget's Remi Jomard at Watches & Wonders 2026 for a conversation about why the brand feels so distinct right now. The setting is a fair built around novelties, but the strongest thread is not hype. It is philosophy: how Piaget keeps returning to its archives, its technical history, and its jewelry-level sense of color without turning the past into a costume.
Remi's answer starts somewhere unexpected. When Lex asks what object first made him want to create, he does not name a watch. He names architecture, specifically Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion. That early attraction to minimalism, natural proportion, and clean structure became a path into engineering, and eventually into the kind of work where aesthetics and high-end technical execution have to live inside the same object.
Old codes, modern construction
One of the clearest ideas in the conversation is that Piaget is not simply copying its archive. Remi points to a game the brand can play in its booth: put vintage private-collection pieces beside new releases, switch the labels, and the visual language can still feel connected. But internally, the watches are radically different because Piaget is building them for 2026, not the 1970s.
That distinction matters. Piaget is drawing from what Remi calls a strong philosophy around the way time was worn in the 1970s, then rebuilding that feeling with today's technique. The result is why the brand can feel vintage and current at the same time. The shapes, colors, and attitude may come from the archive, but the construction, materials, tolerances, and finishing belong to the present.
Lex frames it as a moment where the broader watch world has caught up to Piaget. Vintage design is back, stone dials are more desirable than ever, and collectors are rediscovering the freedom that has always been part of the maison's identity. Remi does not reject that reading. He leans into it, but makes clear that the appeal only works because the brand has the technical depth to execute the idea properly.
The Polo 79 and the risk of stone
The Polo 79 becomes the clearest example. Lex is wearing the new version and asks about the challenge of cutting ornamental stone into the watch's stepped, godroned architecture instead of treating it like a flat dial. Remi's answer is practical: the case is thin, the dial space is limited, and the thinner ornamental stone becomes, the more fragile it is.
That means the team has to find the right balance between beauty and breakage. They need full stone plates that can be sliced while keeping consistent veins from 12 to 6 and from 3 to 9. They remove the portions hidden by the gold godrons, but still have to preserve the visual continuity that makes the finished watch feel whole. Remi calls it a real issue for the year, then adds simply that they fixed it.
That understatement says a lot about Piaget. The final watch looks effortless because the work is hidden inside the execution. The same challenge appears in other ornamental-stone pieces, where drilling into a block while preserving the dial's veins becomes, in Remi's words, a nightmare. But that nightmare is also the point. Piaget's difference is not only that it uses color and stone. It is that the brand knows how difficult those choices really are.
Engineering still starts with what if
Remi's engineering background gives the episode a different texture. Lex asks whether Piaget solves these problems through computer modeling or through building, breaking, and rebuilding. The answer is both. When the team can rely on proven building blocks, modeling is the easier route. When the project is more experimental or produced in very small quantities, they become, as Remi puts it, crazy chemists in the lab.
The Altiplano Ultimate Concept story captures that mindset. The project began with a simple question: what if Piaget put the whole watch into the thickness of the first ultra-thin movements it launched decades earlier? Seven years later, that sentence became a watch. Along the way, the team worked with a special cobalt alloy and even broke a CNC machine during an early machining attempt because the raw material behaved so aggressively.
For Remi, the record is not the point by itself. Piaget had already been early in ultra-thin watchmaking, so chasing thinness for bragging rights would not be enough. The real reason to pursue the technology is what it gives the creative team: more room for color, aesthetics, and new design possibilities.
Why Piaget does not need to become everything
The conversation also reveals a clear resistance to over-expansion. When Lex asks about the Andy Warhol watch, Remi says the brand should stay true to the original. The appeal is already in the size, thickness, gold rings, and distinctive shape. Piaget may play with gem setting, as it has done through satin-brushed, multi-row, and single-row set versions, but he does not want to distort the form just to create endless variants.
He gives a similar answer when Lex asks whether smaller pieces like the Sixtie could be developed differently for men. Remi does not believe every strong watch needs to be declined into every size and every format. Some designs are strong enough as they are. Change too much, and the object becomes weaker instead of broader.
That restraint may be one reason Piaget feels different in the current market. Many brands respond to renewed attention by stretching a design as far as it will go. Remi's approach is more disciplined. Protect the shape. Use setting, material, or caliber only when it supports the idea. Let the watch remain itself.
A brand with rhythm
Near the end, Lex asks Remi which artist represents what he does at the brand. Remi chooses Swiss trumpeter Erik Truffaz, describing music that is jazzy, chilly, sometimes liquid, and not always easy to place inside a band. It is a fitting answer for Piaget. The brand's best current work does not fit neatly into one lane. It is watchmaking, jewelry, architecture, nostalgia, color, and engineering all at once.
The hot seat makes the hierarchy even clearer. Remi chooses Polo 79 over Polo, Andy Warhol over Sixtie, and Altiplano when the choice turns to Piaget's ultra-thin identity. Asked to choose between music and design, he refuses. Asked whether aesthetic or wearability and engineering comes first, he gives the most honest answer of the episode: for him, aesthetic; for people, the second answer.
That balance is the reason Piaget feels alive in 2026. The brand is not choosing between beauty and technique, archive and novelty, jewelry and watchmaking. It is using each side to sharpen the other. And in Remi Jomard's telling, that is not a trend. It is the core of what Piaget has been trying to do all along.
