Geometry of Glamour: Piaget’s ‘Shapes of Extraleganza’ finds form in Abu Dhabi

When Piaget brings its particular brand of radiance to a city, it never arrives silently. This week the Swiss maison unveiled Shapes of Extraleganza at Erth, Abu Dhabi’s modernist landmark whose falcon-wing architecture seems to echo the collection’s sculptural vocabulary. Staged in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office, the event runs until November 1st and feels less like a jewellery showcase than an experiment in how design, culture, and identity can refract through gold and light.

The collection marks the second chapter in a trilogy inspired by Piaget’s creative zenith of the 1960s and ’70s - a time when Yves Piaget’s orbit included Salvador Dalí, Arman, and Andy Warhol, and when jewellery flirted openly with art. That same audacity hums through these new pieces: high-gloss geometry colliding with curves, colour shifting with the light, nostalgia morphing into something distinctly current. At Erth, whose name means “legacy” in Arabic, the dialogue between past and present plays out in steel and silk, in light and shadow, in the rhythm of form itself.

Among the works on display, the Abu Dhabi-exclusive Shimmering Lights sautoir has already become the show’s obsession. Reimagining Piaget’s 1969 “swinging sautoirs,” it pairs iridescent mother-of-pearl with the shimmer of the Gulf, a tribute to the region’s pearl-diving heritage and to the way time, craft, and storytelling can be worn around the neck. It’s both ornament and archive - a gesture that turns cultural memory into motion.

If Essence of Extraleganza, last year’s first chapter, was about refinement, this sequel is about rhythm and risk. Triangles fracture into waves; circles melt into sharp lines; textures ripple like sound. The influence of Pop Art and psychedelic couture is unmistakable, but the mood is contemporary - maximalism polished to a whisper. Piaget calls it “playful audacity”; it feels more like geometry with a pulse.

For Abu Dhabi, the collaboration carries its own symbolism. In recent years the city has leaned hard into culture as an act of nation-building, trading in oil’s gravity for art’s luminosity. Piaget’s presence here, under the careful eye of ADIO, folds neatly into that narrative: global luxury meeting local heritage, the precision of La Côte-aux-Fées meeting the poetics of the Gulf. “Abu Dhabi’s evolving cultural scene offers the perfect canvas for bold creativity and artistic dialogue,” said Piaget CEO Benjamin Comar. It’s corporate diplomacy, yes - but also accurate. The city has become a testing ground for new expressions of elegance, where Western craftsmanship and Arab modernism can share a single aesthetic vocabulary.

Ultimately, Shapes of Extraleganza isn’t only about jewellery; it’s about what happens when heritage is treated as a material - something to be cut, polished, and reshaped. In Abu Dhabi’s desert light, Piaget’s forms don’t just gleam; they seem to move, to breathe. The maison that once defined thinness in watchmaking now defines fluidity in meaning, turning geometry into glamour and legacy into form.