The new Polo Minute Repeater is broad enough to dominate a wrist, slim enough to slide beneath a cuff, and loud enough to ensure the table hears what just happened. Only five pieces will be made every year.
A minute repeater is luxury at its most wonderfully unnecessary. It tells the time aloud through tiny mechanical chimes, solving a problem that electric light rendered obsolete while creating one of watchmaking’s most difficult complications. Piaget has now installed one inside the Polo, its sport-chic line, and the result is a watch of entertaining contradictions.
The new Polo Minute Repeater is 48mm wide but only 9.3mm thick, fashioned from rhodium-finished white gold and capable of chiming at 64 decibels, roughly the volume of an ordinary conversation. It is broad enough to dominate a wrist, slim enough to slide beneath a cuff, and loud enough to ensure the table hears what just happened. Subtle, in other words, but only in profile.
The machinery
The machinery is not entirely new. Calibre 1290P first appeared in the Emperador Coussin Automatic Minute Repeater in 2013, after six engineers had spent three years developing it. At 4.8mm thick, it was then the world’s thinnest self-winding minute-repeater movement, while the complete 9.4mm watch also set a record for its category. Other manufacturers have since gone thinner, and Piaget has resisted pretending otherwise.
Instead, it has repackaged that formidable calibre in a case one tenth of a millimetre slimmer and given it a contemporary Polo identity. Calling this a revolution would be generous. Calling it lazy would be unfair. Thirteen years later, an automatic chiming movement scarcely thicker than two stacked coins remains an impressive party trick.
A blessing in blue
The blue dial is where the new watch earns its name. Made from gold, partially openworked and decorated by hand with radiating guilloché, it retains the Polo’s familiar horizontal architecture while exposing the hammers, levers and wheels beneath. At four o’clock, a smoky blue sapphire ring bearing the words “La Côte-aux-Fées” frames the regulator that controls the pace of the chimes. It explains the complication without reducing the dial to a mechanical shop window.
Piaget says each dial requires around 50 hours of finishing. A blue embossed calfskin strap keeps matters relaxed, while an additional alligator strap is supplied for owners who prefer their six-figure complications formally dressed. There is also a High Jewellery version with blue sapphires, diamonds and a fully openworked dial, because Piaget knows restraint is sometimes merely the first option on the menu.
The theatrical operation
Operating it is pleasingly theatrical. Pull the slide on the left side of the case downwards, and the watch sounds the hours, quarter-hours and minutes on demand. The hours ring in G-sharp, the minutes in A-sharp, and the quarter-hours combine both notes. The numbers are less romantic: 64 decibels, three harmonic partials and a quoted damping factor of 2,600, intended to produce a long, clean decay rather than the metallic clatter of a hotel-service bell.
The large case is functional as well as fashionable, providing space for resonance, while brackets and screws transmit vibrations from the gongs through the white gold. A platinum micro-rotor winds the movement without adding bulk, and the power reserve is approximately 40 hours. That is modest, although anyone owning this watch is unlikely to lack a winder.
Sporty, really?
The obvious objection is the word “sport”. At 48mm, on leather, with only 30 metres of water resistance, this Polo is about as athletic as a tuxedo at brunch. Its size also feels defiantly 2013 in an era rediscovering 36mm watches. Yet the width is partly the price of keeping the movement thin and the sound strong, so the proportions possess logic even when they resist fashion.
Official pricing is available only on request, and production is constrained by craft rather than a fixed edition: Piaget plans to make just five pieces every year. The Polo Minute Repeater is therefore neither a fresh mechanical breakthrough nor a convincing sports watch. It is something more characteristically Piaget: an extravagant old idea made slimmer, louder and considerably better dressed. For once, reheating a classic has produced something worth listening to.