Piaget has always been at its best when it is using stones that other watchmakers will not touch. At Watches and Wonders 2026, the brand brought back the Polo 79 in white gold with a dial carved from a single piece of sodalite, and it is the most interesting thing on the Piaget stand this year.
Sodalite is an ornamental feldspar, dark blue, veined with white, and not especially forgiving to cut or polish. You see it on tabletops, rarely on watch dials. Piaget is one of the very few manufacturers that still maintains an in-house stone-cutting workshop, in Plan-les-Ouates near Geneva, and the Polo 79 sodalite is the kind of piece that argues for keeping that workshop open. Monochrome's first-look coverage noted that the stone was selected and cut in-house from the same rough block, so the tonal character of every dial will be slightly different.
A quieter Polo
The contemporary Polo has always had a split personality. The Polo S, introduced in 2016, was positioned as a sport-luxury watch and competed directly with the Royal Oak and Nautilus. The Polo 79, re-released in 2024, is closer to the original 1979 Yves Piaget design, a dressier, flatter, thinner watch with the signature horizontal "gadroons" on the dial and bezel.
The new sodalite reference sits inside the Polo 79 line. The case is 38mm in white gold, 7.45mm thick, with an integrated bracelet and the gadroon motif carried through from the dial to the bezel to the first bracelet link. T3's hands-on coverage flagged the weight as one of the first things a wrist notices, since the white gold bracelet sits significantly heavier than the steel and titanium Polos.
Inside is Piaget's 1200P1 ultra-thin automatic, a 2.35mm calibre with a micro-rotor and a 44-hour power reserve. It is not a new movement, but it is one of the thinner self-winding movements in production, and it is what makes the 7.45mm case height possible.
Why sodalite, specifically
Piaget's stone work has tended toward the aggressive end of the colour spectrum in recent years. Tiger's eye, lapis, turquoise, malachite, all high-saturation choices that photograph well and look loud in person. Sodalite is comparatively restrained. It reads as dark blue from three feet away, and only reveals the pale grain structure when the light hits the dial directly.
Something About Rocks, in its Piaget recap, described the effect as the stone "whispering rather than shouting". On a 38mm white gold case, this is exactly the tone the watch needs. A loud stone on a gold integrated-bracelet sport watch tips the whole thing into novelty territory. Sodalite lets the Polo 79 remain a dress-leaning piece.
Supply and price
Piaget has not announced a limited edition run, but the brand's public communications describe the sodalite Polo 79 as "limited availability", which is the standard language for pieces where supply depends on the quality of the incoming stone blocks. T3 estimated the retail price will sit between 65,000 and 75,000 Swiss francs, in line with other Polo 79 references in white gold.
For collectors, the real signal is that Piaget is leaning further into what it has historically done better than anyone else. The brand's stone-set and hard-stone-dial work is not trying to match the Genta-era icons of its peers. It is trying to do something they cannot.
Sources: Monochrome, T3, Hypebeast, Something About Rocks, Time and Tide.
