A true legend has left us today, as Diego Maradona passed away from heart failure. When the question is raised who was the greatest soccer player in the world, Pelé and Maradona are usually named. The two were close friends who openly admired each other. Maradona effectively utilized his small stature with his unsurpassed ball control and passing and dribbling skills on the field. This made it possible to make a goal after a 60-yard dribble, passing five England players in the 1986 Word Cup quarter-final. In 2002 this moment was voted ‘Goal of the Century’ at FIFA.com. Maradona and his team won that year the World Cup.
Diego Maradona, with Hublot CEO Ricardo Guadalupe, Pelé, during the football match of friendship with Pelé and Maradona sponsored by Hublot in Paris, France on 9th of June 2016
Maradona was also a profound lover of high-end fake watches. One of his signature trademarks was always wearing two of them. The reason for this was that he kept one set at the time in his homeland, Argentina, while the other showed the local time. Both watches were usually always precisely the same, which made it quite a style statement.
While Maradona was known to wear Rolex, he also had an intimate association with perfect Hublot replica. In part, this is due to the close relationship that the brand has with FIFA and the world of soccer, but also because Maradona genuinely appreciated the brand. He even became one of their ambassadors and frequently made appearances at Hublot events.
Maradona and Pelé
Maradona has been seen wearing several different Hublot’s, from stylish Classic Fusions to diamond-set Big Bangs in King Gold. The brand also made a few limited editions in his honor. These models shared with each other a blue and white color theme, as a reference to the outfits of Argentina’s national team, as well as the number 10, which Maradona wore throughout his career. With the passing of Maradona, we not only lose a charismatic man and a profound lover of fine timepieces but, most of all, one of the best soccer players that have ever entered the field.
Few, if any, watches are as capable of inspiring a sudden and unexpected feeling of pure awe as the Swiss made replica Piaget Altiplano Ultimate Concept watches. It’s not very likely that you’ve had a chance to see one, much less strap one on – it was released as a pure concept watch only, in 2018 and was announced as a full production watch this year – but if you are one of the very few who’ve had an opportunity to experience it, it’s not likely you’ll forget the encounter any time soon.
The cheap replica Piaget Altiplano Ultimate Concept watch is remarkably – and almost unbelievably – thin. Stack two credit cards together and you’ll be able to gauge the thickness of this watch. It’s just 2mm thick. It is nothing less than the thinnest mechanical watch, overall, ever made.
Few watchmakers have done as much to innovate, elevate, and advance the art of ultra-thin watchmaking as Piaget. Founded in 1874 in the small village of La Côte-aux-Fées, Piaget was born as a movement manufacturer, producing movement components for other fine watchmakers. With a family motto of “Always do better than necessary,” the Piaget family was determined from the start to make a name for their brand, and so they focused on the specific engineering and production craft of ultra-thin manufacturing.
Since the beginning, Piaget has repeatedly pushed manufacturing and design boundaries, breaking its own records time and time again while creating watches that are beautiful, wearable, and awe-inspiring. This deliberate choice to focus on ultra-thin watchmaking is just one reason it can be said that ultra-thin is the Piaget complication.
The sun peeks over the mountains in La Côte-aux-Fées and lights up the Piaget manufacture, just as it has since the 1800s. It’s here that Piaget’s master watchmakers focus on producing some of the slimmest watches in the world, continuing a decades-old tradition that’s put Piaget on a plane of its own.
Ultra-thin watchmaking is a distinct craft in and of itself. The Altiplano Ultimate Concept watch required completely rethinking every single part of a watch – from movement to case to crystal – all while balancing elegance and technical engineering, as manufactures push material and machining capabilities to the limit. The design and development of a new balance spring alone took three years. The development of a new cobalt alloy case cost the company a production machine that couldn’t withstand the stress of the rigid new material. The extreme mastery of manufacturing required for ultra-thin is unlike any other complication, and best AAA fake Piaget has not only perfected it for hand-wound, but also automatic and tourbillon movements. So challenging is ultra-thin watchmaking, that it is often considered a complication in its own right.
“The thinner you are, the more complicated it is. There are no miracles,” says prototype watchmaker Jean-Daniel Hofman. “It’s much more complicated to produce an extra-thin watch than a classic watch, especially in terms of manufacturing.”
As a result, manufacturing and design times for best UK 1:1 fake watches like the Altiplano Ultimate Concept watch are measured in years – not months.
“The thinner you get, the more complex it is to have a wheel pinion, a main plate or a bridge that is perfect, that is reliable,” says Quentin Hébert, Head of Global Watch Marketing at Piaget.
Piaget’s approach to watchmaking and ultra-thin innovation is directly tied to the brand’s “four pillars of craft” – gold, movement, color, and light. These ever-present tenets infuse every Piaget creation and keep each watch firmly rooted in the brand’s legacy, serving as touchstones for even the most avant-garde timepieces.
With more than 160 years of fine watchmaking to lean on, Piaget’s evolution is set within a context of juxtaposition – of past and present, craft and technology, and form and function. Balancing this juxtaposition is central to Piaget’s ethos and managed gracefully by a team of watchmakers who have dedicated their careers to preserving ultra-thin technology.
“Our way of thinking about innovation and the future of watchmaking is to really think about how we can make these four crafts evolve, be different, be transformed, to innovate and to create the watches for the future of Piaget,” says Hébert. “Ultra-thin is not our history. This is our DNA.”
The first Piaget Altiplano was announced in 1957, debuting the legendary Caliber 9P. The Caliber 9P introduced the brand’s first ultra-thin mechanical hand-wound wrist watch to the market with a movement a mere 2mm thick. Built without precise machining or computers, to produce such a thin watch was nothing short of a technical revolution. Its 2mm thickness truly allowed Piaget to present itself as the “specialist of the slimmest watches in the world.”
A 2mm thick movement has always been the goal for Piaget and continues to be the backbone of the entire Altiplano collection, inspiring the design, shape, and profile of every watch leading up to the Altiplano Ultimate Concept. From 1957 to today, this has been the constant driving force to do, as Valentin Piaget would say, “what has never been done before.” Unbelievably thin, the introduction of the Caliber 9P forever changed ultra-thin watchmaking.
Piaget continued to outdo itself in 1960, when the brand announced the Caliber 12P, then the thinnest automatic movement in the world. At 2.3mm thick, the Caliber 12P movement was slightly thicker than the 9P, but housed a movement that represented a new set of exceedingly difficult technical challenges. . Most importantly, the 12P introduced a micro-rotor automatic winding system to the movement. For decades, the 12P held the record for the thinnest automatic watch, redefining men’s elegance in watches, but at no point would Piaget abandon its quest for slimness. It also developed the thinnest quartz movement in 1976 with the caliber 7P, and several record-breaking calibers at the onset of the 21st century.
Fake Piaget Swiss Movements
In 2002, Piaget struck gold again, with the introduction of the Caliber 600P – a 3.5mm hand-wound tourbillon. Not only had Piaget mastered the production of ultra-thin watchmaking – defining the craft as a complication in and of itself – but now it had produced the thinnest tourbillon available on the market, once again redefining the limits of movement thinness for the entire industry.
Soon after, Piaget took watchmaking even further, integrating case and movement design to go beyond the pursuit of ultra-thin caliber development. In 2014, Piaget debuted the Caliber 900P, which fully integrated the caseback and bottom plate of the movement, resulting in an entire watch now measuring a mere 3.65mm thick. The 910P, introduced in 2018, relied on the fusion of case and movement to achieve a new record of thinness for an automatic watch, at a mere 4.3mm thick. This new achievement set the stage for a world of ultra-thin opportunities to be achieved by Piaget in the coming years.
In 2018, Piaget debuted the Piaget Altiplano Ultimate Concept – a continuation of the last 80 years of work for the brand and the culmination of generations of dedication to ultra-thin. The thinnest hand-wound mechanical watch in the world again achieved the ultimate goal of reaching only 2mm in thickness overall – an unbelievable feat for even Piaget. Simply put, the Piaget Ultimate Concept defies the rules of watchmaking and achieves a wearability that is unprecedented.
The development of the Piaget Altiplano Ultimate Concept Watch provided watchmakers with the opportunity to build upon the achievements of the first Altiplano watch and infuse the design and spirit of the original ultra-thin watch into this mechanical marvel. From an engineering standpoint, the AUC takes cues from the 910P to eliminate a separate movement and instead integrates the movement into the caseback itself, which performs the function of plates and bridges – a perfect fusion of movement and case. With the entirety of the mechanism exposed, the movement becomes the Altiplano Ultimate Concept Watch’s design, and wearers are offered a look inside the world’s thinnest mechanical watch with every glance at the wrist.
Nothing wears like a Piaget Altiplano. On the wrist, the impossibly thin watch seems to almost disappear. This is, of course, deliberate. In the ultra-thin mindset, there’s an inseparable harmony between watch and wearer. Piaget’s watches are designed to sit close to the skin and become an intimate part of the wrist.
The evolution that led to this point of view is a direct result of Piaget’s reinvention of ultra-thin technology, not just to break records, but to practically serve the lifestyles of those clients that appreciate unparalleled wearability and a push to the edge of possibility.
In many ways, personalization is connected to the exclusivity of Piaget, as the entire experience of purchasing and owning an Altiplano Ultimate Concept is intended to be personal. On one hand, the level of detail and intense care that is channeled into the production of each AUC results in the customer being able to touch and feel the individual work that goes into his or her watch. The ornamental side of Piaget allows for more explicit personalization, all going back to the four pillars of craft (gold, movements, color, and light) established by the brand.
Piaget’s approach to the personalization of the Altiplano takes this to the next level, providing customers with the opportunity to create a watch that is inextricably a part of his or her identity. Through the Piaget Infinitely Personal concept, collectors have the ability to customize the colors of the dial, bridge, hands, screws, case, and strap. There are more than 195,000 possible unique permutations. With each customization, the watch becomes bespoke and entirely individual.
“Personalization is really an experience at Piaget,” says Hébert. “A specific experience that clients have with Piaget.” But it’s also something more beyond bespoke special orders. It’s the personal experience of wearing something so technical. It’s the personal expression of thousands of hours of hand craftsmanship.
“You experience the manufacturer with the Altiplano Ultimate Concept,” he says. It’s really the experience of the ultra – the extreme technicity – of Piaget.
Producing genuine awe in watchmaking is not easy. But as a brand committed to elegance, Piaget is motivated by a desire to explore refinement in a modern context, and the result is just that.
For quality Piaget replica, ultra-thin is at the service of the aesthetic to offer something different, creating a piece of art with every watch. And while the thinness of the Piaget Altiplano Ultimate Concept is truly awe-inspiring, perhaps even more impressive is Piaget’s decades-long commitment to the art of ultra-thin watchmaking. Or, maybe the two are the same, an expression of and commitment to excellence in craft and art.
Based on a prototype from the late 1960s, thecheap fake Tudor Black Bay P01ref.70150 reveals a little-known aspect of the brand’s history. For this feature, originally published in our May-June 2020 issue, we tested the current serial model. The Tudor Black Bay P01 is shown at right; the “Commando” prototype from the 1950s at left. History tells us that Tudor supplied the U.S. Navy with divers’ watches as early as the late 1950s. But Reference 7922 wasn’t introduced until 1964 and is considered to be the first dive watch from Tudor. It was water resistant to 100 meters.
“Commando” Was the Codename for a Special Bezel System Three years later, the Swiss brand began developing a highly functional watch to replace the Oyster Prince Submariner Reference 7928, which was the Navy’s standard watch at that time. The first phase of development led to various prototypes and a patent for an unprecedented function. The ambitious project with the codename “Commando” was never realized, but the plans were carefully preserved in the company’s archives. The novel component was a hinged mechanism on the case that could be unlocked to reset the bezel and locked to secure the bezel in place. Patented in 1968, the hinged mechanism was also intended to simplify maintenance and servicing.
The stainless steel case replica Tudor Black Bay P01 of 2019 (P01 stands for Prototype No. 1) incorporates this system, but not in its complete functionality. It’s primarily based on the locking mechanism, which lets the wearer secure the Black Bay P01’s bidirectional rotatable bezel by operating the hinged mechanism between the strap lugs at the 12. The rotatable bezel can theoretically be used as a divers’ bezel, although the ring wasn’t designed for this purpose. Calibrated for 12 hours with half-hour subdivisions, the bezel clicks into place in 60 increments, i.e., in single-minute steps, and it does so very crisply and accurately in response to slight downward pressure. But users who want to read elapsed time can only read it every minute at 5-minute intervals and the start of a time span. Here’s how to use the bezel of the Black Bay P01. If you want to measure a short time span, like a brief jog through the park, simply rotate the bezel until its non-luminous triangular marker is opposite the tip of the minutes hand. To read the elapsed time, you’ll need to mentally convert the hour markings on the bezel into 5-minute increments. For a longer interval, like a bike ride or a hike in the mountains, turn the bezel until the triangular marker is opposite the tip of the hour hand. In the same way, the bezel can be used to set a second time zone. In this case, set the corresponding hour marker on the bezel to the marker on the dial and the hour hand.
For any of these actions, raise the hinged mechanism by pressing down between the lugs at the 12. This frees the bezel so you can rotate it in either direction. The correct pressure point is marked on the hinged flap with small grooves. It can be folded back into the locked position by applying slight pressure to the bezel or against the steel connector on the bracelet. This prevents the system from remaining open on the wrist, which can lead to the bezel being accidentally adjusted. The moveable construction also ensures that the Black Bay P01 fits perfectly on every wrist, even though it’s almost 56 mm from strap lugs to strap lugs. A Modern Movement Behind a Retro Facade To minimize reflections, the stainless-steel housing is completely satin-finished. Its sporty angular design is slightly sharp-edged near the crown protector, and you can feel this sharpness when you wind the best quality replica watches manually. To accomplish this task, first unscrew the knurled crown with the Tudor logo from its threaded connection and then turn it. Withdrawn to its middle position and then turned, the crown quickly adjusts the date display, which automatically advances shortly after midnight whenever the watch is running. The modern movement inside the case also allows the date indicator to be corrected at any desired time without jeopardizing the mechanism. This mechanism is no less up-to-date than the state-of-the-art 70-hour power reserve offered by automatic manufacture Caliber MT5612, which is housed behind an opaque screwed back and therefore unfortunately not visible.
The movement, which was originally custom-made for the Pelagos, is the first caliber ever developed by Tudor. It was introduced in 2015 and has been built and assembled in-house ever since. Conceived to tick inside the highly functional Pelagos divers’ watch, this caliber was designed with robustness, durability and reliability in mind. That’s why the large balance with variable inertia and a frequency of 4 Hz (28,800 vibrations per hour) oscillates under a sturdy bridge affixed at two points rather than under a conventional cantilevered balance cock screwed at only one point. Tudor Caliber MT5612 Furthermore, the balance oscillates together with a silicon hairspring, which is less sensitive than conventional balance springs to external physical influences such as temperature fluctuations, pressure changes, gravity and magnetism. The oscillating system, which is regulated via four screws on the balance wheel, consequently performs with solid chronometer-worthy rates, which we confirmed under laboratory conditions and in a wearing test conducted on the wrist for several weeks. When fully wound and measured on the electronic timing machine and on the wrist, the Tudor Black Bay P01 clone runs with almost no deviation. Its timekeeping strays very slightly into the “minus” column as the tension in its mainspring gradually decreases.
A Combination of Historical Aesthetics and Modern Watchmaking The manufacture caliber is decorated in the typical style of the Tudor brand. The openworked rotor and the automatic bridge beneath it are satin finished. The plate and the other bridges alternate between polished and sandblasted surfaces and laser-etched details. Caliber MT5612 indicates the hours, minutes and seconds from the center of the matte black, slightly curved dial. As with all other models in the Black Bay line, the P01 has adopted the characteristic, angular “snowflake” hands, which first appeared in the brand’s catalog in 1969. Together with luminous and variously shaped indexes, the hands guarantee bold contrasts and excellent legibility in both good and poor lighting conditions. The well-chosen light beige color of the luminous material, which is also used on the date disk, underscores this new model’s connection to its history. Thanks to this combination of historical and modern aesthetic codes, the P01 fits perfectly into the Black Bay line, which is much more than a series of identical new editions of models from the past.
The snowflake motif also appears on the underside of the strap, which was developed exclusively for the Swiss automatic movement copy Tudor Black Bay P01. The strap is a rubber-based combination with an element made of brown leather on top. It displays retro charm thanks to its pale contrasting stitching, and the movable lugs more than symbolically establish the connection to the original prototype.
