Piaget Altiplano watches

The Piaget Altiplano is the brand's ultra-thin dress watch: a round gold case and a plain dial. Its roots are two movements, the hand-wound calibre 9P of 1957, about 2 mm thick, and the automatic 12P of 1960, each the thinnest of its kind in the world when it appeared. The Altiplano name came much later, in 1998; until then Piaget's in-house watches were simply called Piaget. An Altiplano XL won the Ultra-Flat Watch Prize at the 2003 Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève.

The Altiplano 900P of 2014 pushed the idea further. Piaget built the case and movement as a single unit, which brought the watch down to 3.65 mm and made it the world's thinnest hand-wound mechanical watch at its launch, taking the record from Jaeger-LeCoultre. It is a 38 mm watch in pink or white gold, some versions set with diamonds.

The rest of the range is classic dress watchmaking in gold. The core is the 38 mm three-hander, 6 mm thick in its plainest form, with a 34 mm size beside it. The Small Seconds moves the seconds to a subdial, the Ultra Thin Automatic is the self-winding model at 40 and 43 mm, and the Skeleton opens up the movement in a 38 mm case just 5.34 mm thick. The 41 mm Chronograph keeps to 8.24 mm, and a 24 mm quartz sits at the small end. Cases are pink, white or yellow gold, with a platinum edition limited to 488 pieces, and many carry a diamond bezel or a fully paved dial.

The Mythical Journey pieces belong to Secrets & Lights, the collection Piaget showed at Watches & Wonders 2015, themed on Venice and Samarkand. The Venice enamel G0A40602 sets champlevé enamel into a gold dial, adds snow-set diamonds, sits in a 38 mm white gold case set with 78 diamonds and runs on the automatic 860P. The Samarkand pieces turn to other crafts, guilloché, scrimshaw and eggshell marquetry among them, in limited runs of 8 to 38 pieces.