The 'Envelope' in Woven 18k Gold

At rest it is a small envelope of woven 18k gold, about the size of a matchbook, its basketweave worked by hand and framed with a bright polished border. Press the centre of the flap and it opens: the watch inside lifts on its hinge and stands upright, a white dial with black Roman numerals and blued steel hands, signed Piaget. Read the time, close the flap, and the watch disappears back into the gold.

Piaget made very few objects this quietly theatrical. The envelope belongs to the Maison's great decade of dressed-up watchmaking, made around 1965 as a travel and desk piece for people who wanted the time nearby but not on show: on a night table, in a jacket pocket, beside a hotel telephone. The winding crown is set with a sapphire cabochon, the small blue full stop Piaget put on its dress pieces, and a French owl import mark is tucked into the weave, the trace of the watch's journey when it was new.

The reason the trick works at all is a movement thin enough to vanish inside a case the depth of a few stacked coins; its story is told in The Calibre below. What matters in the hand is the object itself: 42.7 by 31.1 millimetres of woven gold, dense, hinged and precise, as much goldsmithing as watchmaking.

Complete, honest examples are not easy to find, because these were used: carried, packed, opened a dozen times a day. This one has survived with the weave even and intact, the polished borders bright and the dial clean, and it winds and runs correctly. It keeps its original black Piaget pouch.

The marks, the movement and the condition are set out piece by piece in the drawers below; the movement's story is told in The Calibre.