AS WE mentioned in our recent watch round-up, Piaget is making some serious noise this month with the arrival of their new Polo Minute Repeater. It’s honestly Piaget’s year, given the strong showing they had earlier in 2026 at Watches and Wonders in Geneva, introducing a range of new stone dials and swinging Sautoirs. But the Minute Repeater has quickly earned a spot at the top of our list, for details we’ll explain below.

Measuring in at 48mm and 9.3mm thick with its elegant white gold case, the Piaget Minute Repeater has quickly become our favourite dress-adjacent sport watch. Firstly, there’s the engineering needed to fit a chiming mechanism into that height that is deserving of a closer look

Some backstory. The Polo has always occupied that in-between territory. When Yves Piaget designed the original in 1979, the sport-chic watches around it were cut from steel, and he made his in solid yellow gold. It later took its name from polo, a sport Piaget sponsored and one Yves called “athletic, demanding and precise” – the same discipline he brought to the streamlined nature of the Polo. The watch would quickly become a favourite of those within the worlds of fashion and art, worn by the likes of Andy Warhol and Ursula Andress.

The new model keeps the collection’s shape-in-a-shape design, here in rhodium-finished white gold with a palette of deep blue. At 9.3mm it slips under a shirt cuff with ease, and 30 metres of water resistance means a long lunch by the harbour is no cause for concern. The embossed blue calfskin strap suits the daytime, and the second leather strap supplied alongside it is the one we would fit for evening.

A minute repeater sounds the time on demand. Pulling the slide at nine o’clock tensions a dedicated spring while a system of racks and snails reads the position of the hands. As that spring unwinds, two hammers strike two gongs: low tones for the hours, a paired high-low strike for each quarter, and high tones for the remaining minutes. At 4:37, that means four low notes, two double strikes and seven high notes.

Keeping that sequence evenly paced is the job of the regulator. Piaget uses an inertia wheel, visible at four o’clock through a smoked blue sapphire ring engraved with “La Côte-aux-Fées”, which controls how fast the spring releases its energy so each strike falls at a steady interval. Anchor governors can produce an audible buzz as they work; an inertia regulator is designed to keep that noise down, leaving the gongs clear. Around it, the hand-guilloché white gold dial carries blue PVD accents, with sections of the mechanism visible beneath a gold fillet, and more than 150 hours went into its development.

Piaget quotes 64 decibels, around the level of normal conversation, so the chime can be heard without lifting the watch to your ear. Three harmonic partials shape the tone, with the hours pitched at G sharp and the minutes at A sharp, both in the fifth octave. Even the slide moves downward, a detail that required rethinking the movement’s architecture to suit the Polo’s proportions.

The chime is driven by Calibre 1290P, which measures just 4.8mm and was first used in the 9.4mm Emperador Coussin in 2013, making this new case a tenth of a millimetre slimmer. It is built from 430 components at the La Côte-aux-Fées manufacture, some of its gears only 0.12mm thick. Winding comes from a platinum micro-rotor set level with the movement, which saves the height a full-size rotor would add. It beats at 21,600vph with a 40-hour power reserve, and a further 50 hours go into hand finishing its components, from hand-bevelled bridges to a guilloché mainplate and mirror-polished hammers.

Only five numbered pieces are planned for this year. Alongside them sits a High Jewellery version, with a bezel of baguette-cut blue sapphires, a diamond-set case and a fully openworked dial that puts the entire 1290P on view. Price for both is on request, and for a grand complication at home with a dinner suit and a linen shirt alike, we can think of no finer way to hear the time.

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