On The Move

The Polo’s journey as Piaget’s star of casual luxury inadvertently leads to this turn as an all-occasion accompaniment for women

- Alvin Wong

An unmistakable child of the late-1970s, the Piaget Polo was born in a time of horological upheaval and adventure. Conceived during the quartz revolution, an era that offered diminishing returns for luxury mechanical watches, the Polo exemplified the adage ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ as watchmaking houses cracked their collective craniums to haul themselves out of the spectre of debt and irrelevance. Amongst their solutions was the concept of ‘casual luxury’; a notion that an expensive watch need not be uppity and dressy, but also sportive and versatile to offer its owner more mileage in both style and performance.

It was fortuitous that these companies had a pathway of sorts in place. Several years earlier, the likes of Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe had proven, with the success of the Royal Oak and the Nautilus, respectively, that it was possible – lucrative, even – for brands to venture into the then-fledgling category of luxury sports watches. In fact, it was rumoured that, in a mere few years after its launch, the Piaget Polo was so successful that it made up almost one-third of the company’s watch sales.