Watches & Wonders is a lot of things. It?s an opportunity for brands to network with their dealer networks and sell the watches that wind up on the wrist of end users later in the year. It?s a chance for the press to get a first look at those watches, take photographs, and bring you what we certainly hope are insightful stories about them so you can learn and potentially make informed buying decisions. But as much as anything, it?s an opportunity for brands to simply show off. That?s what goes through my mind when I consider the Piaget Altiplano Ultimate Concept, which saw a new unique, 1 of 1 variant debut at Watches & Wonders last week. This is a watch that seemed almost like a prank when the concept version was announced, and absolutely blew the minds of the larger community when Piaget put it into production a few years later. What we have here isn?t exactly new, but just a reminder of what Piaget is capable of. It?s a flex, pure and simple. 
Thinness in a watch, it?s often said, is like a complication unto itself. The problems inherent in watchmaking are simply less challenging to solve when you have a greater depth to work in. Once you start getting into ultra-thin territory though, you really have some physics problems that need to be solved if a watch is going to both work (pretty important) and be wearable. Watch movements are typically constructed on multiple planes, which creates depth, and moving everything to a single plane as Piaget has done...