A Slender Skeleton by Piaget

The novelty of the year 2022 — the Piaget Polo Skeleton — boasts a whole range of impressive specs.

Piaget has been a major player in miniature watch movement manufacturing since 1957 when it comes to height. That was the year the company unveiled its hand-wound Caliber 9P movement to the world which was just 2 mm in height. Research into engineering ultra-thin watch movements hasn’t stalled since then.

The culmination of this research to date is the Altiplano Ultimate Concept watch, which was awarded the Aiguille d'Or prize at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève (GPHG) in 2020. Its case which forms part of the movement is no more than 2 mm thick. Miniature models usually appear in the Altiplano line, which features chronographs, tourbillons and skinny perpetual calendars, both hand-wound and self-winding.

The 2022 novelty — the Piaget Polo Skeleton — may be a little thicker than its wafer-thin relatives, but it boasts a whole range of extraordinary specs. Firstly, it's a skeleton which scraps unnecessary metal in favor of transparency to display the modern architecture of its self-winding manufacture movement. 

The watch is powered by the 1200S1 movement, a skeletonized version of Piaget's famous 1200P movement, which is itself descended from the 12P — the world's thinnest self-winding movement in its time. The 1200P measures 2.35 mm in height while some of its wheels were no thicker than 0.12 mm.

Apart from being astonishingly thin at 2.4 mm, another thing that makes Caliber 1200S1 special is its off-center micro-rotor at 8 o'clock, which provides a 44-hour power reserve. Secondly, the Piaget Polo Skeleton belongs to the iconic Polo line of practical watches which dates back to 1979.

Unlike the traditional Altiplano case, Polo continues to stand out in 2022 for its ingenious combination of two silhouettes: a round case with a pillow-shaped center. Thirdly, an anniversary version of the Piaget Polo Skeleton has been released, where the manufacture movement is housed in a white-gold case measuring 42 mm in diameter and 7.35 mm in height.

The case is encrusted with 268 diamonds, paired with a precious bracelet set with another 1,478 precious stones. Over 60 hours go into the stone setting, which isn't that much when you consider how the jewelers have to work with stones varying in shape and size in order to produce the perfect pattern of diamonds.