A story of friendship, that of Andy Warhol with Yves Piaget and his Maison’s watches, spanning almost a decade. From their first meeting in 1979, amid iconic clubs in New York and Palm Beach, glittering evenings at Chez Regine in Paris, and crazy nights at Studio 54, the American artist and the great-grandson of the Maison’s founder created a new way of life of elegance, modernity, and hedonism that combined Swiss craftsmanship with the glamorous, glossy universe of the Hollywood star system.
Andy Warhol and Yves Piaget.
With the brand, today, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts-among the largest funders of contemporary art in the United States and the world-continues the long association.
In 2024, when the Swiss Maison and the Foundation became official partners for the first time, the famous Black Tie – that is, the one purchased in 1972 by Warhol himself, when it was still known only by the reference 15102 – was renamed after him. Presented in a single new version, with a blue meteorite dial and a coussin case decorated Clou de Paris, it celebrated this bold and almost paradoxical link that united the artist to the Piaget name.
On the left the Black Tie that belonged to Andy Warhol, on the right Andry Warhol.
Then, a few months later, comes the request for another collaboration. This time, one that would involve working and studying Warhol’s work itself, not just his name. “We spent six months researching Andy Warhol before deciding which direction to take,” says Stéphanie Sivrière, Piaget‘s creative director.
“With such a wealth of material at our disposal, it was very difficult to know where to start. Were we to be inspired by one of his most famous works and reproduce a banana, a soup can or Marilyn Monroe? We knew right away that we wanted to express Warhol, but without being obvious. We wanted to suggest, not show.”
Thus was born the new Andy Warhol Watch “Collage,” a limited edition of 50 pieces that interweaves the chromatic language of gemstones and precious metals used by the Maison with the aesthetic and conceptual universe of the father of American Pop Art.
Colors, Stones and Materials: Piaget’s Chromatic Approach
But who was Andy Warhol, for Piaget? What did his idea of industrial art and seriality have in common with the brand’s meticulous, almost monastic craftsmanship? Color, above all. Which is THE central element of Warhol’s visual language, and the expressive key to the stone dials so dear to the Maison, and which today is the lynchpin of this collaboration.
For Piaget, they are the colors stolen from the exuberance of nature, ranging from the inclusions of turquoise to the veins of malachite to the siren’s opalescence of “water stones” and the golden reflections of tiger’s eye. Hues and shades that exist in nature, but seem to belong to the world of dreams; small fragments cut out of the dial that tell extraordinary stories of research, dedication and creativity.
Some advertisements from the 1970s depicting various versions of Piaget with colored dials.
In contrast, for Warhol, color is often wrong – as in Marilyn Monroe’s light blue skin and Mao’s green lips – or deliberately unnatural, derived from the saturated advertisements that filled media screens in those years: Coke red, Pepsi blue, Kodak yellow. It is the vivid and surreal tones of marketing that become, in his Art, real codes of visual seduction – turning everyday commercial objects into cultural goods.
With the new Collage limited edition, Piaget continues this research on color and materials, in line with the artist’s provocative, ironic and pop spirit.
The new Piaget Andy Warhol “Collage”
For the new Andy Warhol “Collage,” Piaget chooses a dial decorated with an inlay of colored ornamental stones arranged in an abstract shape that recalls one of Warhol’s most famous self-portraits, created in 1986 with a collage of Polaroids.
A meticulous inlay application insets three perfect cutouts in soft, sugary colors into a background of black onyx, the same color as Warhol’s original Black Tie : the soft pink of opal is juxtaposed with the mottled yellow of Namibian serpentine and the mentholated green of chrysoprase.
The geometric design, interrupted only by the dauphine hands and applied brand name, is framed by the famous stepped case, originally made to camouflage the Beta 21 quartz movement, a massive caliber made by Piaget with Rolex, Patek, Omega and sixteen other manufacturers. In this version, the case measures 45mm and is made of 18-karat yellow gold-a metal that faithfully pays homage to the ’72 edition and is not available in the contemporary Andy Warhol Watch collection.
The satin-finished case back of the watch is engraved with the artist’s self-portrait that inspires the silhouette of the dial, alongside the Piaget logo and Andy Warhol’s signature.
Inside, in place of the Beta 21, Piaget installed the in-house mechanical self-winding caliber 501P1, a slim movement with a 40-hour power reserve decorated with the Côtes de Genève circular stripe pattern.
The watch, complemented by a green leather strap, is limited to only 50 pieces. The retail price is €79,500 (VAT included)
Conclusion
Of this “chromatic commodity”-an art that for Warhol always remains industrial and synthetic, immediately legible because it is artificial-Piaget recovers all the force and hypnotism. For watches that have nothing industrial or synthetic about them, and indeed are unique and unrepeatable precisely because the natural nuance of the stones and the magic of the slow and meticulous gesture that cut them guard a beauty that no modular or silkscreen copy machine will ever be able to replicate.
“I don’t wear a watch to tell the time, I just wear it to look at it,” said Andy Warhol. And it is perhaps in this phrase that the deepest meaning of the encounter between his art and Piaget’s craftsmanship is fulfilled: the ability to transform a functional object into a contemplative act.
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