The Piaget Altiplano vs. the Vacheron Constantin Traditionnelle: Which Solid-Gold Dress Watch Is Better?
The trend toward dress watches, and smaller ones in particular, has been so powerful that even Rolex sports watches are dropping in value as prices for the dressy 36 mm Day-Date skyrocket. It’s not as if the solid-gold dress watch ever really fell off the horological map, of course, but there’s no denying that today’s watch enthusiast is more interested in a classic dress watch than in the past decade. Part of the explanation could be that crypto-bros and pandemic collectors have left the scene, but there has also been a surge of interest in quiet luxury in the past couple of years. The sartorial zeitgeist, it seems, is in transition.
For those of us who prefer simple, time-only dress watches, the moment feels like a needed correction. I personally own and wear a bevy of small vintage Vacheron Constantin time-only watches from what many call the golden era of Swiss watchmaking—the 1940s through the 1960s—and they serve me well every day. If I, and many of my aspiring sartorial cohorts, have a complaint about modern dress watches, it is that they’re too big. Even the modern Patek Philippe Calatrava reference 5227 at 37 mm—though among the most gorgeous solid-gold dress watches currently produced—is borderline indiscrete. One watch dealer told me that he advised his client to stop wearing his 5227 in Manhattan, for fear he’d get mugged.
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One lesson that a watch journalist eventually learns is that you can’t meaningfully judge a watch until you’ve seen it in person. But it’s even better to wear it for days on end, and better still to wear it in a special context that will draw out the subtleties of a design. With that in mind, we asked Piaget and Vacheron Constantin to lend us two modern solid-gold, time-only dress watches, both in solid pink gold, for a few weeks. We took in the 35 mm Piaget Altiplano Origin ($20,300) and the 38 mm Vacheron Constantin Traditionnelle ($23,700). The next step was to find an occasion to put them through their paces.
That occasion arose when we were invited to hang out with the renown Manhattan-based Italian tailor Max Girombelli at his swanky studio Duca Sartoria on the upper East Side. Max is dashing, his tailoring second-to-none, his client list elite, and his own watch collection filled with vintage Rolexes, many small, time-only models. Max told Robb Report that he enjoys wearing time-only watches with tradionally tailored suits and jackets, as they offer a quiet accent. We couldn’t agree more.
Max lit up when he saw the Arturo Fuente cigars I brought him (his favorite non-Cubans), but he smiled even more widely when I unveiled the Piaget Altiplano. The bright red alligator strap picked up the tri-colore stitiching on the tunnel cuff of his tailored white shirt, and his warm smile accompanied his nostalgia for the Piaget dress watches that dominated Italy’s midcentury heyday.
As the watch made the rounds, everyone was impressed with its simple, confident, traditional design, and the women in the room were especially happy about the 35 mm size. If there’s a naturally unisex watch being made today, it’s the Piaget Altiplano Origin.
We all lit up over the Vacheron Constantin Traditionelle, as well. Granted, the brown strap was quite a divergence from the flashy red strap on the Piaget, but the Vacheron spoke with even greater confidence from behind its reserved, perfectly executed visage. The dauphine handset and sub-seconds dial emit quiet confidence and precision, while the highly decorated hand-wound movement, visible from behind the clear caseback, is a surefire conversation starter.
At 38 mm, the Vacheron does wear a little large, but not annoyingly so. The pink-gold is not ruddy red, and the silvered dial is subtly luminescent. When compared to the Piaget’s radially brushed dial that dances in the ambient light, the Vacheron, despite its larger size, may be the quieter watch of the two—this a testiment to both watches exhibiting their respective brand’s house-style to a tee.
Inside Max’s stuio we studied the Lora Piana fabric samples, of which there were hundreds on shelves. A smattering of cashmere, silk, and wool technical fabrics sat on the table, and I couldn’t stop placing the watches on the fabrics as I imagined having a jacket tailored around a specific watch in my collection. When I asked Max about this possiblity, he brushed it off saying that one wouldn’t want to limit a jacket in that way. I told him I would willingly do so, and he rolled his eyes playfully, illiciting laughter from those gathered.
When it was time to step outside for a smoke, the watches came with us. Max’s rooftop is a classic Manhattan oasis, tucked behind the building with trees providing shade and quiet, a table that could easily seat 20 stretched beneath the branches. Max generously offered me a Cuban Monte Cristo, and as the blue smoke floated skyward, the watches continued to make the rounds.
The power of a simple, solid-gold dress watch to bring an outfit to life and set a mood can’t be oversated. The same can be said for a good cigar, and the two together cast a special spell. Once we were into the delicious middle of our sticks, stronger opinions about which of these two watches was the better choice began to emerge. There’s no getting around personal taste, of course, and as value propositions these watches remain more or less in a dead heat.
At $20,300, the Piaget offers one of the most beautiful auto-winding movements on the market today, the ultra-thin caliber 501P which comes in at just 3.6 mm in thickness. The gold rotor is a nice touch in this context, and Piaget’s history as the leader in ultra-thin watches is undeniable.
At $23,700, the Vacheron Constantin Traditionnelle is a fair comparison. The manual-winding caliber 4400AS comes in at 2.8 mm in thickness, but keep in mind that the Piaget movement achieves its thinness while incorporating a full-sized peripheral winding rotor. The Vacheron—as has long been the brand’s manner—sports large, thick plates with perfectly beveled edges (anglage). The name Traditionnelle suits the mechanical construction here. (Vacheron offers even thinner watches in its Patrimony line, but at the moment is not offering its incredible, ultra-thin 1002 maunal and 1020 automatic calibers, which once held first-place as the thinnest mechanical movements).
So where do we come down on this dress watch shoot-out?
It’s almost impossible to make the case for one over the other, but as a general statement it would be fair to characterize the Piaget as the flashier choice (again, depsite its size and not because of that red strap). The Piaget’s dial is simply dazzling, as most Piaget watches are—this to be expected from a storied jewelry house—and even the lack of fast-moving seconds-hand doesn’t seem to subdue the Piaget’s inherent bling.
The Vacheron, on the other hand, is quieter, more stately, and, yes, traditional in almost every way, despite its modern sizing. We’d have to give the Vacheron an extra point for the hand-set alone, which is one of the sharpest and highly beveled dauphine-style sets on the market—truly gorgeous against that silvered dial.
As for the movments, both are incredible offerings, but each is unique and unto itself. The auto-winding Piaget is going to be a little less fussy to wear on the dialy, of course, but those who prefer to wind their watches up—often cited as a quiet mechanical moment in our busy digitized world—will find the solid, assured action of the keyless mechanism very satisfying.
In the end, both watches are exceptional examples of a tried-and-true format, and both designs have been, and will continue to be, relevant for decades. Such is the nature of timeless designs like these.
