Piaget

Piaget Gouverneur - A Quick Look Review

 

When I think about Piaget’s best watches for men I think first about the elegant and ultrathin Altiplano collection of watches, and then about the sporty Polo collection (in particular the FortyFive). With the Gouverneur, introduced just one year ago at SIHH 2012, Piaget has created a third collection of round watches for men, one that strikes the perfect balance between the refined nature of the Altiplano and the sporty size of the FortyFive.

Nested within the Black Tie collection, the Gouverneur collection consists of three timepieces. The crown jewel is the Gouverneur Moonphase Tourbillon. A basic complication is the Gouverneur Chronograph, featuring Piaget’s in-house automatic chronograph calibre 882P. The simplest watch, and the focus of this review, is the Gouverneur Date.

Like other watches groupings within the Black Tie collection, such as Emperador and Protocole, Gouverneur share some of the same design codes, such as Dauphine hands, applied indexes, sunburst guilloche, and gold lines framing date windows and subsidiary dials. What I appreciate about  Gouverneur more so than with the other watches in the Black Tie family is that it has a more whimsical feel and sense of play with roundness in the visual transition from a circular case, to an oval bezel and outer dial, then back to a round inner dial.

The case diameter of the Gouverneur Date is 43 mm, just like with the Altiplano automatic, but the two watches have very different appearances when set side by side.


The slimmer bezel, which consequently leads to more surface area for the dial, of the Altiplano gives the impression of it being the larger watch. The Altiplano also wears larger due to both its extreme thinness (it is only 5.25 mm thick) and straight lugs. The lugs on the Gouverneur curve down and hug the wrist better, making it more wearable than the Altiplano by those who have smaller wrists.


The case of Gouverneur has an attractive mix of high polish and satin surfaces, and its 9 mm height makes it about 20 grams heavier than the 43 mm Altiplano.

The movement is Piaget’s in-house Calibre 800P, a full rotor design with two barrels that give the movement an 85 hour power reserve.


Just as there are design codes for cases and dials in the various Piaget collections, so too are there finishing codes for the movements of Piaget movement, in particular with the use of circular Geneva Waves and blued screws.


The dial of the Gouverneur Date is where the eye will linger longest, and where the aforementioned movement between the oval and circular shapes plays out. The sunburst guilloche is only on the outermost sector of the dial, and highlights the oval. It leads directly to a circle, framed with gold, that shows the applied hour markers and printed minute dashes. The inner edge of the applied markers frame another gold circle, and the line of the applied markers is kept, but the texture dramatically changed to recessed channel that leads to the center of the dial.


Piaget has created a beautiful, wearable, and very interesting watch in the Gouverneur Date. While it is very elegant, and certainly would not be out of place on the wrist of a gentleman wearing his tuxedo, its size will give the owner the chance to wear it much more casually as well. While the Altiplano design remains my favorite by Piaget, the Gouverneur would be a watch that I would actually wear more often.


Bill

 

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