Piaget: Sunlight shines in the new ‘Golden Oasis’ high jewellery collection

The Swiss brand Piaget presents a new collection of high art jewellery every year during Paris Haute Couture Week, and 2019 was no exception. In this year’s collection entitled ‘Golden Oasis’, the brand continued exploring a solar theme, taking inspiration from sunlight. Necklaces, bracelets, earrings and rings appear to absorb the dazzling light of the sun and remind the viewer of the mysterious colours of a desert landscape, the outline of each piece changing as the sun progresses through the sky.

The ‘Golden Oasis’ collection is divided into three lines: ‘The Play of Lights’, ‘Desert Minerals’ and ‘Native Bloom’. Between them, they work to convey all the beauty and diversity of the desert down to the smallest detail, through the use of spectacular combinations of gold and bright-coloured precious gemstones. Among them, you will encounter the usual suspects of high jewellery: diamonds, sapphires, rubies and emeralds as well as gems that are gradually becoming ‘regulars’ in unique pieces such as spinels, Paraiba tourmalines or spessartite garnets.

The ‘Golden Oasis’ collection elevates the beauty of the natural world to new heights by making use of an ocean of glittering gold as its main means of expression. The ‘Play of Lights’, ‘Desert Minerals’ and ‘Native Bloom’ are the main stars of the collection. – Piaget

Each of the three lines in ‘Golden Oasis’ embodies a different attribute of the desert: the burning sun, the vastness of the desert’s dunes, the rarely seen greenery and, of course, the life-giving oasis which this greenery surrounds. All the pieces combine the desert theme with Piaget’s house motifs: marquise – cut precious stones arranged in various combinations, as well as exquisite Palace Decor engraving on gold.

The ‘Play of Lights’ line draws its inspiration from celestial bodies. From the daytime: the blinding sun, and the sand dunes which melt beneath it. At night: the enchanting twinkling of the stars. In order to convey the richness of this imagery’s colour palette, the designers turned to white and pink gold, white and yellow diamonds, succulent rubies and pink sapphires. The most remarkable design in this line is undoubtedly the ‘Golden Hour’ necklace, with its fancy yellow diamonds weighing a total of 6.63 carats. It took the whole year for the house’s gemmologists to find the right diamonds that perfectly match by colour. On top of that, the masters then had to create a piece of jewellery that did justice to the sun at its zenith, a task which took another 450 hours of intensive labour.

In the ‘Desert Minerals’ line, Piaget designers sought to embody the idea of energy, radiated by the sun and absorbed by the stones of the desert. Diamonds, rubies and sapphires are set into moving structures, as in a stunning ‘Blue Waterfall’ sapphire necklace, or the matching pair of earrings. Some pieces, for example the ‘Blue Waterfall’ watch, had an impression of movement.

At first glance, the flowers and plants of the ‘Native Bloom’ line appear to be delicate and defenceless – but grown in such extreme conditions, they are distinguished by an enviable resilience. The imagery of the succulent leaves that are nurtured by the oasis is conveyed, of course, by rich green emeralds in a variety of cuts: in the ‘Luxuriant Oasis’ necklace there are several rows of stones, each fashioned as a marquise cut. In a cuff earring, the main pear cut emerald alone weighs 1.45 carats, while the watches from this line are decorated with leaves of malachite, with its idiosyncratic white streaks.

At Piaget they have joked that the masters behind the collection needed no less of a capacity for endurance than the plants in the sands that they sought to depict. In order to turn the jewels of the desert into these stunning works of high jewellery, they had to draw on every last ounce of their artistic talent. It certainly shows.