The newest Polo is a watch that should remind us that overall, this is a range deserving of more attention.

If you sat down and sketched out a rough Venn diagram of recent watch trends (what do you do with your evenings?), there is a good chance that right at the middle would be this new Piaget Polo. First of all, it is a stainless steel luxury sports watch – a class of watch that once consisted of a bare handful of designs (the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak, Patek Philippe Nautilus and Vacheron Constantin Overseas (née 222) are the ones you would carve into a horological Mount Rushmore, with the original Polo following not far behind, along with Girard-Perregaux’s Laureato), but now has proliferated far and wide. Bell & Ross has its BR 05; Zenith its Defy Classic; A. Lange & Söhne its Odysseus, Bulgari the Octo… etc, etc ad infinitum.

It’s worth explaining, while we’re here, that this idea is quite distinct from a stainless-steel bracelet watch a la TAG Heuer, Rolex or IWC SCHAFFHAUSEN. The latter make watches descended from practical tools, which used steel as the most suitable material and, largely, stick to simple case shapes. A luxury sports watch, or “sports-luxe watch” as its often called, is a design that takes its cues from the mid-late 1970s, playing with geometric and textural contrasts, produced by brands that had no real stake in the practical tool watch market of the 1950s and 1960s, using steel as a daring statement that fused everyday usability with high-concept styling. This comes through if you know the original Polo – a much more “out there” design, albeit one that I think were it to be revived, would now do rather well.

That brings us to our second point on the Venn diagram: the Polo is a child of the 1980s. Before pedants write in, I know the original Polo was actually launched in 1979 (the year after the other major 1980s revival story of recent times, the Cartier Santos). But it lived as a 1980s watch, and ran with 1980s trends. Elsewhere, Chopard’s Alpine Eagle, and the general appetite for mixing steel and yellow gold, are proof that what was once gauche is great again. This has been the decade that Swiss watchmaking would rather forget, for quite a long time, but in the last couple of years these big, bold, Gordon Gecko designs have been rehabilitated.

Third and finally, this new Polo fits in with a theme that regular readers will be extremely familiar with: colour. It’s not just that it has a dial that steps away from the palette of black, white or blue – it’s the particularly vivid, vibrant green, and the delicate use of gold on the hour markers, hands and surrounding the date window that elevates this particular model. Piaget, with its background as a jeweller as well as a watchmaker, has always had a more playful, open-minded attitude to colour and shape in its designs. In a way, the rising popularity of colourful dials and steel cases has rather forced it to share the limelight. But perhaps this is the watch to turn our attention back to the Polo. I won’t insult it by suggesting it could be all things to all people – it has far too much character for that – but if the Venn diagram that we have hastily constructed in our minds proves anything, it’s that it deserves that much.

Piaget Polo

Material: Stainless steel

Diameter: 42mm

Height: 9.4mm

Water-resistance: 100m

Power reserve: 50 hours

Price: £11,400