While auctioneers Christie’s and Sotheby’s flogged the collections of Elizabeth Taylor and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis after their deaths, watches identical to theirs were reissued recently both by Piaget to unbridled success. Here, Piaget’s artistry beams resplendent with a rather supple, almost fabric-like bracelet as well as coloured stones, which hark back to ancient civilizations.

Ironically, evening watches first appeared a century ago and were hidden within a bracelet. In the early 1930s the future Duchess of Windsor appeared at The White House with such a watch – one of the many gifts from the then Prince of Wales, future Edward VIII, and later Duke of Windsor – worn on top of black gloves for maximum visibility. Equally, if not more visible, are cuff-watches, the other renaissance in bejewelled watches – also from the interwar years as well as the 1970s.

Nostalgia for the bygone days of post-war chic and glamour is abundant. The then insouciance seems also amiss. Why else would both Taylor as well as Kennedy Onassis in particular school their children in Gstaad at Chalet Marie-José? Just imagine a world without instant communication and gratification: vulgar CNN and social media?

For a far more discreet Gstaad habituée, a malachite example proved the watch for a cold climate. Unlike her predecessors, she did not have the luxury to buy hers new, but rather at auction.

Still convalescing from a partial double-mastectomy, she left her hospital bed warmly enfolded in a full-length lynx coat, with her unwashed hair disguised under a matching hat, to place a bid on her future Piaget.

Having survived cancer, she decided to pick up sticks and winter in Palm Beach, where humidity proved the undoing of the watch movement: rusted and replaced twice. Thereafter, and despite a new movement, it nevertheless, sold for a pittance at Christie’s Geneva post-war-themed auction “Chic & Glamour” in November 2000; with a catalogue prefaced by Hubert de Givenchy, the late preeminent French couturier and then Christie’s France Honorary President.

As it happens, the Hong Kong buyer of this Swiss creation that had traversed the continents was drawn to its hallmark Chinese Imperial colours of green and yellow.

But not everyone is so retro. Tiffany’s new collection is pedestrian, literally: inspired by the chain-link fences that punctuate New York’s sidewalks. Equally, Tiffany’s matching gift box is transformed to reflect grit and grime. Woke away.

However, one marketing standard remains: enlisting celebrities, dead or alive. Whilst Piaget’s are so 20th-century, Tiffany’s are rather much of this moment: living symbols of the American zeitgeist.

ALAN NAZAR IPEKIAN