Light, sun, dusk, dawn: Piaget regularly offers extraordinary collections of high jewelery inspired by romantic, fantastic and, above all, luminous atmospheres. The story of 2021 told by the Swiss Maison is entitled Extraordinary Lights and continues the path traced in previous years. The level of excellence remains as high as possible and manages to combine creative originality with luxury, with the ability to create jewelry together with the choice of particularly precious stones. The collection is divided into chapters, which resemble the different atmospheres that condition emotions. The first is called Festive Lights and is reminiscent of the glows that accompany special days. The second, Magical Lights, refers to the sunrise, while the third chapter Infinite Lights is a combination of dazzling brightness. The collection also includes high watchmaking proposals, which made Piaget famous, capable of combining technical efficiency with goldsmith skills.
Festive Lights
After a year lived dangerously (and in forced isolation), the desire for celebration is stronger than ever. The chapter is divided, in turn, into two creative lines. The first, Blissful Lights, includes jewels with combinations of white and yellow diamonds, among the rarest fancy shades, especially in the case of very pure crystals of large dimensions and without fluorescence. The chances of being classified as intense, Piaget recalls, are even more remote. The necklace’s intense yellow diamond of 10.12 carats, whose qualities are enhanced by the radiant cut chosen specifically for this gem, is an excellent example.
Transformable creation: 3 different ways to wear. The radiant-cut diamond can be removed and worn as a ring. The neckline can also be worn without the radiant-cut diamond
Combining the brilliance of a round cut with the angular purity of an emerald cut, the radiant shape allows the diamond to absorb and thus reflect a large amount of light, offering the best luster and creating the brightest of gleams. In a unique design, conceived for the first time by the Piaget Atelier and which required the artisans more than a year of work for the conception and development and another 280 hours for the realization, this precious diamond is also removable: it can in fact be transformed into a ring by attaching it to a special frame using an invisible device, in which every detail has been conceived and created with great ingenuity and which allows the necklace to be worn in different ways. A creative approach that fits perfectly into Valentin Piaget’s motto and echoes the desire to keep innovation at the heart of the creation of each jewel.
The Blissful Lights earrings and ring also feature intense yellow radiant cut diamonds making this exceptional suite of gems nearly impossible to replicate or match. The central diamond setting in the Blissful Lights ring has a minimal design that allows light to penetrate and show the gem’s quality and beauty in an outward projection that results in an explosion of brilliance.
The second line, Blazing Night, includes a necklace with 12 magnificent rubies from Mozambique and Thailand, which with their teardrop cut recall the movement of the lanterns (we are always in the Festive Lights chapter) that fly towards the sky. The design of the necklace is taken up and further developed in the manchette watch, an example of Piaget’s primacy in the fields of technical functionality and aesthetics. Together with the ring and a characteristic earring, the jewels of the Blazing Night set are presented as exclusive masterful creations. The rubies used took several years to find and to meet Piaget’s increasingly stringent standards and are the best possible mix of natural red colored gemstones of crystalline purity not subjected to heat treatment.
In the pursuit of perfection, some of the teardrop shapes, the rarest structure for rubies, have been re-cut to ensure impeccable lines and proportions, while all the baguette-cut diamonds featured in the design have been custom made to fit their space perfectly. dedicated. To create these ambitious designs, the necklace alone required the master craftsmen as many as 400 hours of desk work and the timepiece another 250 hours.
Magical Lights
The Northern Lights are one of nature’s most surprising spectacles. Soon after comes this line of jewelry, divided into two lines: Magical Aurora and Dancing Aurora, as well as The Gloaming Illuminations set. The first presents a necklace with a large Colombian emerald of 16.84 carats, rare and ultra pure, with shades reminiscent of those of the Northern Lights. In the case of the finest colored gems, the place of origin is often the key to beauty and is a fundamental element in the quality of emeralds.
Since their discovery in the sixteenth century, those extracted from the land of Colombia are celebrated for their exceptional color. The two-step formation process of the emerald almost always creates an internal stress in the crystal with consequent inclusions and less clarity. For this reason, the gem of the necklace, with its intense color and excellent transparency, is rare and precious. With its perfectly proportioned square cut, this emerald presents itself as the gem par excellence from every point of view. The central emeralds of the ring and earrings, equally endowed with the excellent qualities linked to their origin and whose magical explosion of green tones mimics the aurora, required several years of research.
The Magical Aurora line also includes an asymmetrical and articulated bracelet-wristwatch, which is a typically Piaget piece, a tribute to the heyday of the Maison’s design in the 1960s and 1970s. The watch features the characteristic construction of an ultra-thin caliber with tourbillon movement and cage, typical of Piaget’s pioneering creations since his master watchmakers first developed this elegant design in the 1960s. At that time the challenge shifted to creating a dial worthy of such a pinnacle of luxury and, since its debut in 1964, the inlaid hard stone, one of the most meticulous Métier d’Art, has been used to achieve exceptional results. In this timepiece the white diamonds are set and seem to sway and move in the wind, twirling on a malachite dial virtuously composed of various elements inlay. The watch bracelet is covered with baguette-cut diamonds and emeralds from Zambia.
The Gloaming Illuminations turns from green to pink and set presents a necklace made up of a cascade of 27 sapphires, with a collection of progressive natural shades that took more than two years to complete to find the perfect match in size, hue and quality. . The jewel also includes three padparadscha stones with their highly sought-after salmon pink or bright orange shades in a perfect fusion of nuances rarely seen in nature. The gems are so pure that, exceptionally in the case of sapphires, an emerald cut was chosen for them, capable of revealing their intrinsic beauty. The design is repeated with the 14 gems of the cascade effect of the earrings, made with an exceptional softness that is testimony to the craftsmanship necessary to achieve this effect, while the 6.53-carat pink sapphire chosen as the central stone of the ring shines thanks to a perfect hue, shades and saturation.
Infinite Lights
The starry sky, a show that repeats itself every night and never tires. The infinite stars that dot the sky are the source of inspiration for this line that constitutes the third chapter of Extraordinary Lights. The Extraordinary Lights collier stands out in this line of jewelry. It took Piaget master craftsmen 450 hours to transform this gem collection into an even more extraordinary piece of jewelry.
Low back necklace with 9 different ways to wear
The necklace is fully articulated and is as comfortable to wear as it is fascinating to admire. A spectacular coussin-cut diamond of the finest Fancy Vivid yellow color, re-cut by Piaget to be internally perfect and weighing 8.88 carats, is paired with a 5,34 carat droplet Sri Lankan blue sapphire and a red spinel of Tanzania, always drop, of 3.61 carats, and the whole is flanked by spessartites and diamonds. In the necklace, beauty is combined with functionality, which makes this creation as innovative as it is mind-blowing. Ensuring maximum versatility, the sensational low-back design can in fact be transformed and worn in six different ways. Thanks to an exceptional level of creativity, the necklace has the ability to transform itself from a day jewel to a perfect evening jewel.
The necklace can be worn with both elements at the same time, or transformed to bring out one of the two declinations. The teardrop spinel on the “day side” and the diamonds on the “night side” can also be removed and the diamond chain can be worn as a bracelet. The color combination is repeated in the earrings of the same set, while the matching ring boasts a central Fancy Vivid yellow 5.54-carat coussin cut diamond. Only one diamond out of ten thousand is yellow and only 6% of these are classified as Fancy Vivid, the highest degree of color intensity. As a demonstration of the rarity of these diamonds, after finding the central stone of the ring it took another two years to find and match the diamonds in the necklace and earrings.
