Heaven Sent: Van Cleef & Arpels 2026 Timepieces Take the Cosmos As Their Muse
Van Cleef & Arpels is intimately associated with celestial motifs, but now, with a series of new timepieces, it offers an lunar ode to poetic timekeeping for both male and female collectors alike
Each year, Van Cleef & Arpels’ watch novelties read like a cast list roll call for a fairytale film – fairies, ballerinas, sweethearts, birds and butterflies converge upon glittering dials brought to life with Pinocchio-level panache in dazzling diamonds, painterly enamel, and kaleidoscopic gems. So imagine the collective surprise when the maison announced that the world’s watch editors would be journeying to Geneva to meet its creations for 2026 and that they would be… black? And… brown? What’s more, they would be the fanciful French brand’s first official foray into the men’s watchmaking realm. Our attention, needless to say, was piqued.
Upon the grand reveal in Meyrin’s mountains, we realised that this was, to some extent, a ruse – as the pieces immediately enchanted both male and female industry-insiders alike, riffing upon a universal theme that can capture any heart; the cosmos. The maison has, in fact, made the heavens its muse since as early as 1929, first with a pocket watch that featured a moon phase complication, followed by further creations in the 1950s that turned their gaze to the night sky. In more recent decades, there have been myriad fine timepieces that celebrate the beauty of planets, constellations, and the sun; a tribute to the universal fascination with space and the great unknown.
“Astronomy has always been interesting to mankind,” says Rainer Bernard, Van Cleef & Arpels’ Watchmaking Research and Development Director. “We’re here on Earth and we always look up to something beyond it. The sun gives us energy – even when we’re going vegetables, it’s with extraterrestrial energy,” he quips, as he introduces us to two of the major novelties for coming year, the Midnight Jour Nuit Phase de Lune, and the Midnight Heure d’Ici & Heure d’Ailleurs. “That energy powers our lives, so people have always watched the sky to understand what’s happening up there; it influences and affects us. Some people even believe that the star sign we are born under influences our behaviour and character. In that sense, both astronomy and astrology have always been – and remain – important to us.”
Since 2006, this celestial theme has played the protagonist in the Maison’s Poetry of Time concept and, by extension, its Poetic Complications collection. Here, the maison has transformed the measurement of time into a lyrical method of delivering whimsical wonderment across a handful of core themes – love, nature, fairies, ballerinas, and of course, the solar system. “For me, it’s really looking at time beyond the hours and minutes,” explains CEO Catherine Renier when we met at the maison’s HQ manufacture. “It’s the relationship we have to time; so it can be contemplative – the cycle of the moon – or it can be a more practical time approach, where we need the time where we are and the time where someone else we love or cherish is.”
This is the idea that underpins one of this year’s key novelties – the Midnight Heure d’ici & Heure d’Ailleurs – which translates from French as ‘the time here, and the time there.’ Featuring a dual-time zone movement, the watch indicates the time in two places, which the house says is an ‘invitation to wander, and a window open to the world.’ It doesn’t come much more poetic than that. While part of a dynamic duo of watches intended to stake the maison’s claim in the world of men’s fine timepieces, its 38mm case means any woman can wear it. And its ultra-chic design means every woman will want to. “It can really be a style that a woman can own as much as a man. We didn’t even think about it that way. But the piece, I think, has such a strong presence that it has a universal outreach. It’s relevant. It’s elegant. And it definitely, for me, does not really have a gender,” says Catherine.
The dial alone is extraordinary – the maison’s experts began by considering the optics of precious stones such as rubies, which are warmly hued but with cool undertones, and soon began a series of extensive experiments, adamant on achieving a similar duality. Inspired by ancient glassmaking techniques adapted to watchmaking tools, the enamel was fired at a low temperature for 30 hours, then fired twice more at over 1,000°C to eliminate tricky bubbles, and then hand-dyed, before being shaped for the finished result. This wizardry managed to achieve a unique enamel that is deep amber-brown but shifts with the light, transitioning from deep cognac to dark chocolate shimmer, while flowing gold script spells out the watch’s motto and name with unadulterated romance.
The beating heart is an entirely redeveloped automatic mechanism, which allows the watch to display both time zones with deft ease – a nifty two sector gear system that synchronises two discs and the retrograde minute hand, so that when it reaches the 60 min mark, it can return to its original position as the hour display jumps forwards. To watch nerds, this is seductively effortless, and utterly enticing.
The second creation intended to seduce a new male clientele – but we’re prepared to fight them for this one too – is the Midnight Jour Nuit Phase de Lune, which features two overlapping complications. On a technical level, it is even more astounding than its companion. Its first complication animates a day/night display, while the second complication serves the the moon phase. Even as watch industry enthusiasts, this one took a few explanations of the engingeering from Rainer before its complexity crystallised, but in essence, part of the movement allows a glittering golden sun to gradually give way to an ethereal mother-of-pearl moon over the course of the day, making a slow dance around the dial, while another part ensures that the moonphase accurately tracks the moon’s monthly cycle, and is also available on a whim at the touch of a button. It’s no wonder that this watch alone was four years in the making.
It was an inevitably gargantuan undertaking, but Rainer says there were plenty of key ‘aha’ moments. “When we start to actually try to transform a story into a real creation, we have a lot of aha moments, because it might be an ‘aha’ so that we say, okay, we thought this is simple, but it’s not,” he laughs. “And then when we find a solution, also, this is an ‘aha’, here we have it. Actually, we like that moment, because it’s challenging us. We never look for solutions which are within our comfort zone. We don’t even have a comfort zone, because it’s different every time. Every time it’s a new story, and every time we start from scratch, the story drives it, and we look at the story and say, okay, this is awesome, how do we do that? I have no idea,” he smiles.
“When there’s a part which we don’t know, that’s when we have to invent. It’s like a poem. We want to create a love poem, right? But we want to express a certain feeling. And we have letters that form words, and we recombine these words in a certain way. But sometimes, to express a certain feeling, a word is missing. So we invent the word. We create a new word,” he explains. Rainer gives an example of the maison’s unique, innovative diamond setting technique that places the stone directly into the enamel in order to secure it in place. “Sometimes, it’s like we have to even create new letters to create a new word. This is how deep we sometimes go to innovate, but just to write the poem. Not for the sake of inventing a new word, because the word by itself is useless. It’s only useful within the poem. So innovation is always driven through the story. The story is our master.”
The back of the Midnight Jour Nuit Phase de Lune watch is equally enchanting – the moon’s topography is replicated right down to miniature craters, while vivid miniature planets adorn the crystal. Rainer explains with a smile that the rear of the watch is also even smarter than it looks – it portrays the cosmos as observed not from Earth (like the front of the watch) but the reverse, as if we are stood on the moon, looking back at our home planet.
In all our adoration of the men’s timepieces, it might be easy to overlook two exquisite creations crafted principally for the girls in the Extraordinary Dials collection, depicting two legendary love stories in a heavenly setting. The Lady Rencontre Céleste and Lady Retrouvailles Céleste tell the story of Vega and Altair, also known as Niulang and Zhinu, capturing two romantic rendezvous, one with a midnight blue theme as the lovers appear against a sparkling cloudy sky, a masterpiece in plique-à-jour, champlevé, and grisaille enable. Miniature painting, white gold, and rose cut diamonds are expertly employed to create a medley of precious accents upon the scene. Meanwhile, the second timepiece explores a pink and mauve theme, where the couple appears before a crescent of mauve sapphires. Reaching for eachother across an elegant bridge – a key motif of the maison’s most romantic love stories – the couple is equally enchanting, and on the reverse features the Summer Triangle adequacy formed of three of the brightest stars – Altair, Vega and Deneb – engraved in the sky.
The inspirations of these pieces are not stumbled on by chance. Catherine explains that the maison actually has a storytelling studio, a dedicated team who are trained in the entire Van Cleef & Arpels heritage, patrimony and universe. “They are breathing the maison’s identity, and I receive a lot of proposals from the Studio, and it’s a very difficult task to decide which stories to embark upon. There are endless sources of inspiration for the years to come, and choosing designs when you can only pick two out of ten, it’s not an easy job,” she smiles. Rainer won’t elaborate on the exact story to come next either, but he assures us that they will, of course, remain true to the maison’s poetic realm. “What I can say is that we have a lot of ideas. We call this the bucket of ideas, and we have the luxurious problem that we don’t always know which one to do next. The worst is when you look into a bucket and it’s empty. You’re like, oh my God, what should I do? Never – it’s rather full, and we love taking stories out of the different chapters that are in that bucket and that’s what we create for the coming years. Next year? It’s a surprise.”
All Images Supplied
