Behind the scenes at Piaget, an artisan brings the “Collage” watch dial to life amid Warhol's cues and the components that shaped the model's look. Photograph: Courtesy of Piaget
A year after Andy Warhol’s untimely death in 1987, Sotheby’s staged a 10-day estate sale of the art, furniture, and memorabilia he left behind in his Upper East Side townhouse. Of the 10,000 objects available, none of Warhol’s own artworks were offered. What The Andy Warhol Collection provided, instead, was an intimate glimpse into the enigmatic artist’s carefully cultivated mythos and personal life through the items he cherished: a stuffed bobcat, hundreds of ceramic cookie jars, works by Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns, and 313 watches.
His extensive watch collection veered little from the “high-low” sensibility he broadcast through his Pop Art and signature sartorial look, a sensibility that fed directly into the legend he built around himself. Alongside important Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet references were quartz-battery-powered novelty watches, starring cartoon characters and a cameo by Gene Autry, revealing a man enamored of contradiction. “Like many instinctive collectors, he amassed things in volume,” says Malaika Crawford, stylist and Editorial Director of Hodinkee Magazine. “When he liked something, he acquired it, sometimes with little regard for quality.” For Warhol, watches — objects revered for their mechanical, timekeeping precision — were often mere symbols, part of the visual language through which he shaped his own mythology. “I don’t wear a Tank watch to tell the time,” he reportedly said. “In fact, I never wind it. I wear a Tank because it’s the watch to wear.”
That quote is oft repeated in horological circles, reinforcing his affinity for Cartier — but true horophiles know Warhol’s loyalties extended further. Last year, Swiss watchmaker Piaget officially rebranded its “Black Tie” collection as the “Andy Warhol,” making official “what everyone was calling it anyway,” per journalist and Piaget devotee Nick Foulkes. The revival of this quirky yet elegant model, shaped like a chunky ’50s TV set with a stepped bezel, was followed this past October by the “Collage” edition, which quite literally cemented Warhol’s association with the timepiece via his portrait and signature engraved on the caseback of each of the 50 limited-edition pieces. Flip it over, and the 18-karat gold-encased dial reveals an abstract pattern inspired by Warhol’s Polaroids, rendered in thin slices of yellow Namibian serpentine, pink opal, and turquoise chrysoprase.
Like all Piaget Andy Warhol designs, this release was created in partnership with the Andy Warhol Foundation, honoring his love for the model and the brand. Of those 313 watches offered in 1988, eight of them were Piagets. Of course, there was his “Black Tie” but there were others he’d picked up early in his collecting journey, which began as soon as he had the income to indulge it.
Warhol was formally introduced to the house in 1979 through Yves Piaget, great-grandson of the company’s founder Georges-Édouard Piaget. Although trained in engineering and gemology, Yves championed craftsmanship and artistry (“We create watches, we don’t produce them”) and, much like Warhol, the fourth-generation Piaget understood the power of a social network. Under his vision, the Piaget brand transcended the rigidities often attributed to serious Swiss watchmakers, leaning into glamour and a certain hedonistic lifestyle. His Factory-adjacent “Piaget Society” — a loosely knit cultural salon composed of artists, socialites, and wealthy clients — counted Warhol as a member.
The friendship between Warhol and Piaget mirrored the merging of art, luxury, and celebrity each was channeling through his craft. In his 1975 book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again), Warhol wrote, “An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.” While watches still functioned as society’s primary timekeepers then, Piaget was already looking at them the way Warhol treated a Coke bottle or a publicity still: as mass-produced objects that could be elevated — through design, artistry, and persona — into an emblem of desire. In that sense, Piaget’s watches prophetically enacted Warhol’s ethos, shifting utility into luxury.
The watch industry has long confronted existential threats. The proliferation of the quartz battery in the ’80s nearly wiped out mechanical movements; the 2015 release of Apple Watch had Swiss CEOs bracing for obsolescence. Today, no one needs a watch. With countless other ways to track the hours, they function more as status symbols — just as Warhol framed them — than as timekeeping devices. They are pure luxury, beyond even the level Piaget could have gleaned in the heyday of Studio 54.
Yet against the odds, they’ve not only remained relevant, but grown in popularity. “There have always been alternatives for how to tell the time, but it always ends up back at the watch,” says Efraim Grinberg, CEO of Movado, another brand that Warhol collected. The pandemic ignited a historic boom in secondary-market prices, fueling mainstream curiosity and increasing social media coverage. As more people move into the watch space, the ways of wearing watches have multiplied — and, although we dislike the word in our staid, centuries-old industry, the current “trend” aligns strikingly with Warhol’s personal taste: shapely, dressy, esoteric. “The Cartier Maxi Oval and the Patek Calatravas he gravitated toward in the ’70s showed a remarkably sophisticated and deliberate eye,” says Crawford. “Those watches have since become canonical designs in their own right, independent of their association with him.”
Few people, however, can acquire watches of the caliber Warhol collected — beyond, say, the Gumby novelty watch that Warhol gifted to Keith Haring, widely available on Etsy for $100 (sans-autograph). Most luxury watches remain out of reach. But the surge of timepiece obsessives online and IRL has nudged the industry into an interesting spot, where watches are now regarded, by some, as fine art. When I started my horologically-inclined Instagram account, @dimepiece.co, in the thick of the pandemic, I didn’t even own a watch. What fascinated me was not ownership, but the swirl of ideas they held, from their stylistic implications to their cultural narratives. What watch did Princess Diana wear after her divorce? What wrist candy does Rihanna rock at the airport? And why does it all matter? For me, learning about collections like theirs, or Warhol’s, was more compelling than actually obtaining what they wore.
A year into Dimepiece, I finally purchased a watch (a Cartier Tank). While my humble collection has grown, what keeps me hooked isn’t the hunt, but the artistry, the celebrity, and the luxury of it all — exactly what Warhol and Piaget were tapping into during the Society days. Stripped of their utility, watches endure as symbols of lasting value, far beyond their Warholian “15 minutes of fame.”