Piaget Emperador Coussin Tourbillon Automatic

Even before the economic crisis, old-guard watch houses were referencing their archives for inspiration, perhaps looking for an antidote to the design excess of the mid-aughts. Amid a sea of behemoth Darth Vader watches, retro styles were aesthetic palate cleansers that oozed elegance and good taste. The financial crisis only reinforced this trend as brands espoused the lasting value of classic design. Another boost came from the burgeoning Chinese market, where classic, round watches from status marques continue to be in high demand. The retro resurgence has swept in a new generation of ultra-thin watches modeled on the svelte timepieces of the 1950s and 1960s. This year, brand after brand offers its own take on thin—most still referencing the past. But Richard Mille and Piaget have been proving that thin doesn’t have to mean traditional anymore.

A preview of Piaget’s new Emperador Coussin Tourbillon Automatic Ultra-Thin last November at the brand’s Geneva headquarters demonstrated that ultrathin watches can lend themselves to modernist design as well as to retro style. Of course, this is not news to Richard Mille, who followed last year’s ultra-thin RM O17 tourbillon with this year’s round skeletonized RM033 Extra Flat automatic in titanium.

Richard Mille RM033 in titanium

The Emperador Coussin Tourbillon’s break from tradition starts with its distinctive cushion-shaped case, measuring just 10.4 mm thick. Because complicated watches require more space for their more complex movements, it is particularly challenging to build a thin complicated timepiece. To power its slim new tourbillon, Piaget developed a new movement—the Caliber 1270P, which is the brand’s first ultra-thin automatic tourbillon movement and the seventeenth ultra-thin Piaget mechanism in a lineup that dates back more than half a century.

Following last year’s minimalist, waferlike Altiplano 43mm, the new tourbillon makes a daring aesthetic statement with an unconventional dial design that showcases the movement’s works through laser engraved sapphire crystal. In addition to the spinning tourbillon, which is offset at 1 o’clock, you can also admire the intertwined offset gold microrotor, a dynamic element not often seen on the dial side. The piece’s alternative dial layout also shifts the hour and minute hands to 5 o’clock.

While Piaget’s and Mille’s modernist ultra thins eschew the past, vintage is still the reference point for most designers. When reinterpreting vintage watches for the modern age, the challenge is in upsizing the diameter of the watch to a modern scale while preserving graceful proportions. “When I look at pieces we made in the 1960s, they were also round and fairly classic and not so far apart from today’s Altiplano,” says Philippe Léopold-Metzger, Piaget’s CEO. “But even though it’s similar, something makes it contemporary: the art of the designer. To make something basically round and flat with a modern dial may look simple, but it is not so easy to do.”

Christian Selmoni, product marketing director at Vacheron Constantin, agrees that revisiting the slim classics of the past is not as easy as it looks. Last year, Vacheron introduced the manual-winding Historique Ultra-fine 1955 and the automatic Historique Ultra-fine 1968 based on archival pieces. “Having ultra-thin movements helps because these watches from the ’50s and ’60s had a wonderful balance of diameter and thickness,” he says. “You cannot copy a design from the past and do it at 42 mm with the same dial. We really have to think about what the watch from the ’50s tells us in terms of inspiration and emotion. To recreate this beautiful design is not only matter of thickness and diameter, but overall balance. It’s more about recapturing the spirit of the past.”