PIAGET’S COLOURS OF EXTRALEGANZA TURNS COLOUR INTO HIGH JEWELLERY

Piaget’s latest High Jewellery chapter, Colours of Extraleganza, places colour at the centre of its creative language. Comprising 65 creations, the collection concludes the trilogy that began with Essence of Extraleganza in 2024 and continued with Shapes of Extraleganza in 2025, a sequence inspired by the cultural and creative energy of the 1960s and 1970s.

The new collection considers colour not simply as decoration, but as an element with its own visual weight, texture and character. Diamonds and sapphires appear alongside emeralds, rubies, opals, tiger’s eye, mother-of-pearl and other ornamental stones, with gold providing another dimension to the palette.

This approach has a particular resonance within Piaget’s history. The Maison traces its origins to 1874, when Georges-Édouard Piaget established his first watchmaking workshop on the family farm in La Côte-aux-Fées, in Switzerland’s Jura mountains. His early work focused on high-precision movements and components, establishing an engineering tradition that would later become closely associated with Piaget’s ultra-thin watchmaking and jewellery.

Colour entered that story in a particularly significant way in 1957, with the introduction of the ultra-thin 9P calibre. Its slim construction created new possibilities for gem-set watch dials, allowing Piaget to explore colour across a broader spectrum. That technical development became part of a much wider creative vocabulary, one in which watches and jewellery could be approached with the same sense of freedom and experimentation.

Colours of Extraleganza builds on that heritage while placing greater emphasis on the interaction between hues. The collection includes combinations that are deliberately unexpected: blue sapphire with Paraíba tourmaline and black opal, for example, or pink sapphires alongside orange and white stones. Piaget describes colour as becoming a material in its own right, and the pieces demonstrate that idea through changes in surface, saturation and light.

Among the collection’s most elaborate creations is the Blue Illusions necklace. The design brings together an 8.52-carat cushion-cut Madagascan sapphire, a 3.30-carat Paraíba tourmaline and a 13.98-carat black opal whose green and blue iridescence creates another layer of colour. Sapphires, baguette-cut tourmalines and diamonds complete the composition, arranged in a geometric structure intended to create movement around the neckline.

The necklace reportedly required nearly 900 hours of work in Piaget’s workshops. It is accompanied by coordinating pieces, including rings and earrings, extending the chromatic dialogue across an entire jewellery ensemble.

Another strand of the collection looks towards Piaget’s history of jewellery watches. The Flamboyant Links set revisits the sautoir watch first introduced by the Maison in 1969 as part of its 21st Century Collection. Here, rose gold links are paired with tiger’s eye, whose natural striations provide a contrasting surface to the polished metal. The convertible creation can be worn as a long necklace, choker or wristwatch and is centred on a 4.13-carat mandarin garnet.

The return to ornamental stone is significant within Piaget’s design history. The Maison had previously combined gold links with ornamental stones during the 1970s, and the new piece revisits that vocabulary through a contemporary construction. Matching jewellery includes a ring centred on a 6.42-carat cushion-cut mandarin garnet and earrings featuring two additional garnets.

Gold itself assumes a more active role throughout the collection. In the Gold Swirl set, rose gold follows sweeping curves inspired by the forms associated with the 1970s, while blue-green baguette-cut tourmalines add colour and structure. Elsewhere, rose-gold fluting, traditionally associated with watchmaking, appears across a High Jewellery necklace for the first time, framing orange fire-opal cabochons and indicolite tourmalines around a diamond-pavé dial.

The Gems Pop set takes its visual cue from the Memphis art movement, whose exuberant use of colour became one of its defining characteristics. Piaget translates that spirit into five pieces combining mandarin garnets, aventurine, pink sapphires, thulite, white opal and gold. A sautoir incorporates a detachable pendant watch, with an orange aventurine dial crowned by an 8.30-carat mandarin garnet and a 3.54-carat pink sapphire.

Across these creations, Piaget’s use of colour is closely connected to its approach to craftsmanship. The Maison’s Ateliers de l’Extraordinaire bring together specialised skills in working with gold and precious and ornamental stones, allowing unusual combinations to be translated from initial drawings into intricate jewellery.

The collection also reflects the broader direction of the Extraleganza universe, which takes inspiration from the flamboyance, sculptural forms and cultural experimentation associated with the 1960s and 1970s. Essence of Extraleganza established the narrative in 2024, Shapes of Extraleganza expanded it through form and structure in 2025, and Colours of Extraleganza completes the trilogy by making chromatic expression its principal subject.

The result is a collection that treats colour with unusual breadth. It can appear as the saturated blue of sapphire, the shifting surface of an opal, the warm striations of tiger’s eye or the controlled brilliance of a diamond. Gold, meanwhile, is not simply a setting but part of the visual palette itself.

For those wishing to explore Piaget’s collections in person, the Maison’s current UAE boutique locator lists High Jewellery at the Piaget boutique in The Dubai Mall’s Fashion Avenue and at The Galleria Al Maryah Island in Abu Dhabi. The Dubai Mall boutique is on Financial Centre Road, while the Abu Dhabi boutique is located at Abu Dhabi Global Market Square.

After three chapters, Extraleganza arrives at a natural conclusion in colour. Yet the collection’s significance lies less in its abundance of vivid stones than in the way those stones are made to interact: colour becomes surface, structure, movement and mood. In Piaget’s hands, the jewel is not merely something that catches the light; it becomes a way of giving that light a language of its own.

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