Enchanting Nature: Elizabeth Doerr on Van Cleef & Arpels’ Newest Watches
Bazaar Arabia’s watch columnist shares an overview of the most coveted timepieces of the season…
Van Cleef & Arpels CEO Nicolas Bos has declared 2024 for paying tribute to the in-house traditional decorative arts that the fabled brand practices. This isn’t lip service: the house is committed to applying its adapted jewellery savoir-faire to its watches, a unique savoir-faire obtained by improving upon traditional techniques and even finding new ones in the process.
But it’s not all tradition and technique at Van Cleef & Arpels – light and colour are also fundamental to the Parisian brand’s style.
“All our creations play with light,” says Rainer Bernard, head of watchmaking research and development, which is located in Geneva, Switzerland. “Polished, enameled, engraved surfaces: we often spend hours deliberating on how to achieve the blend of textures that will produce the most exquisite reflection.”
All of this goes a long way to saying that while the new crop of watches is absolutely enchanting, hundreds of years’ of experience have gone into their making. And while that looks easy, it surely isn’t. It’s art.
Lady Arpels Jour Enchanté And Nuit Enchantée
“[The clients] are looking for a kind of objet d’art,” Nicolas says as we discuss the latest timepieces, and the Lady Arpels Jour Enchanté and Nuit Enchantée in particular. These two oeuvres are part of the Extraordinary Dials collection, and looking at them makes it obvious why: housed in a 41mm gold case, their three-dimensional dials come to life by combining a number of house-typical crafts to pay tribute to the overarching theme, Enchanted Nature.
The Lady Arpels Jour Enchanté, which features a graceful fairy picking flowers under a radiant sun, is composed of white gold, yellow gold, yellow sapphires, spessartite garnets, turquoise, plique-à-jour enamel, façonné enamel, and normal enamel. Turquoise, an unusual but incredibly enchanting material, is not at all common in watchmaking. “This very much has to do with jewellery tradition,” Nicolas explains. “These are stones that we used a lot for a very long time, since the 1920s. And there were periods like the ‘60s and ‘70s where they were quite important for their brightness and versatility in the spirit of the times.
This is a tradition we kept, definitely revived, and re-enriched in the last couple of decades. Of course, now we have a much wider spectrum to work from, which we use also for watches. And with the watches we also have the opportunity to add other colors that you don’t necessarily find in natural stones with enameling. But turquoise, like lapis lazuli or malachite, sometimes has a colour that is very strong but also a beautiful and strong material structure.”
The shimmering flowers under the turquoise summer sky are something extra special and not yet seen on a watch dial: these comprise yellow sapphires set into pure, three-dimensional enamel shaped like flowers crafted using a brand-new technique called façonné that Van Cleef & Arpels invented and patented. While plique-à-jour enamel would be translucent enough, it needs a metal frame (see the leaves on this watch); the three-dimensional façonné enamel needs no support. It is even solid enough to support a sapphire. As otherworldly as that is, somehow the hand-sculpted white gold fairy with its pearlescent plique-à-jour enamel wings shimmering in the sunlight of orange spessartites, yellow sapphires, and diamonds seems even more so.
Lady Arpels Nuit Enchantée is based on the same idea, but the fairy rests in a cave made of sparkling crystals while the moon shines in. This scene is crafted using rough pink and violet-coloured sapphires, diamonds, yellow sapphires, white gold, rose gold, grisaille enamel (for the moon and stars), plique-à-jour enamel (fairy wings), and façonné enamel (flowers). The small time-telling dial is made of rock crystal, ensuring that the mysterious look remains even where it is functional.
Lady Arpels Brise D’Étè
The flowers depicted on the dial of the Lady Arpels Brise d’Été sway very lightly as if touched by a gentle breeze… it’s hard to find a more delicate and playful dial than that of Van Cleef & Arpels’ Summer Breeze, a 38mm white gold watch with diamonds set into the bezel. The dial comprises a mother-of-pearl background decorated with tsavorites, spessartite garnets, miniature painting, and plique-à-jour, champlevé and vallonné enamel. Making this dial takes a fastidious 100 hours or more and the hands of many artisans.
While all of this completely enchants the eye, add in the fact that two delicate little butterflies made of plique-à-jour enamel tell the time: they take flight thanks to an on-demand module that keeps time for 12 hours and functions like a one-handed watch. But when you’re lost in such a dial, who needs to know the time to the exact minute? The hours flow languidly, bucolically despite the precise ticking of the automatic movement.
From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia May 2024 Issue