One of the most interesting highlights of the Piaget 150th anniversary celebration is the latest reinterpretation of the Piaget ‘Andy Warhol watch’.
Created in 1972 and produced for less than a decade before its revival in 2014, the Black Tie watch of Piaget is a coveted piece by watch collectors. The cushion-shape timepiece has been always associated with the one and only Andy Warhol. In 1973, ‘The Pope of Pop’ acquired his Piaget Black Tie watch and he collected about seven Piaget watches and none of them was special order – he bought the pieces to complement his style in New York. Four of his pieces are today part of Piaget’s Private Collection.
More about Andy Warhol? We collected a few milestones of his life and his works on the occasion of a recent Warhol exhibition in Dubai here.
Andy Warhol became a friend of the Maison, having met Yves Piaget in 1979 in New York, through Gerry Grinberg’s company; the exclusive distributor of Piaget’s luxury watches in the United States. The pair developed a close bond – Andy Warhol was a regular member of the Piaget Society, participating with Yves Piaget glamorous events hosted in New York and Palm Beach. As the Andy Warhol Foundation describes, ‘between portrait commissions, European film shoots, and international exhibition openings, Warhol was at the centre of a star-studded crowd as he made his way from dinner tables in Paris, Rome, and the White House to cocktail tables at Studio 54.’
Now, thanks to an official new collaboration under license with The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Piaget and the Foundation have formally renamed the Black Tie timepiece: the Andy Warhol watch.
‘The Andy Warhol Foundation is delighted to celebrate the bond between Warhol and Piaget through an eponymous watch with an ethos as timeless, iconic, and singular as its namesake.’ said Michael Dayton Hermann, Director of Licensing, Marketing, and Sales at The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
The debut piece in this cooperation is the Andy Warhol Clou de Paris watch. The cushion-shaped white gold case is decorated with Clou de Paris (hobnail) guilloché motif featuring a jewellery-like pattern of small, pyramid-like squares. The novelty has a one-of-a-kind blue meteorite dial, dauphine-style hands and elegant, thin indexes and it is powered by the in-house 501P1 Manufacture self-winding movement.
The personalisation offering of the Maison dates back to Piaget’s first Geneva boutique in 1959. A similar concept was re-introduced in 2020 with the Infinitely Personal project. (According to McKinsey ConsumerWise 2023 survey, more than 70 percent of consumers expect personalisation in some way, especially luxury customers.) For the new Andy Warhol watch, clients will be offered a host of customisation options – starting with up to 10 different ornamental stone dials (like falcon eye, turquoise or malachite), and the meteorite dial. This can be matched with up to five different colours for the leather strap, while collectors can also opt for either the new dauphine-style hands or the original batons. Finally, the case can come in either white or rose gold.
‘Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art’
Andy Warhol is still a household name, despite of the controversial traits of his career. Although his most famous statement – ‘In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes’ – is supposedly mis-quoted, his (self) branding, the usage of different art forms as a social commentary and seeing art as a reflection of society are all very relevant today. A great number of brands have made his works into products or collaborations throughout the last decades, like Converse, Supreme, Calvin Klein, Tiffany & Co. This summer Absolut Vodka launched a new campaign around a rediscovered artwork of Warhol and brings it to the public’s eye with an Absolut Warhol limited-edition bottle (in 1985, Warhol created his own personal, artistic interpretation of the Absolut bottle silhouette as part of the Absolut Art campaign).
Berlin, London, Munich or Dubai are hosting Warhol exhibitions this year. His work remains also highly collectable, many of his works have sold for upwards of $50 million at auction (the current record is ‘The Blue Shot Marilyn’, sold for $195.4 million USD at Christie’s in May 2022). The Andy Warhol Museum in his native city of Pittsburgh is the largest museum in the US dedicated to a single artist.
Would you like to know a bit more about Andy Warhol? Check out our article about one of the latest Warhol exhibitions in Dubai here.
Photo credits: Piaget. Loupiosity.com
All registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.
All rights reserved.
