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A BEAUTY THAT TRANSCENDS TIME

Journey through the art of storytelling with a maison like no other, one that marries the crafts of jewellery and watchmaking to create pieces that celebrate imagination, and where every detail unfolds a unique narrative. Pieces that honour the beauty, innovation and flourishes of enchantment that define the legacy of Van Cleef & Arpels

Two lovers meet on a bridge; a young couple have their first kiss surrounded by twinkling lights and stars. Fairies grace the skies, ballerinas dance across dials and flowers flutter in an imagined breeze. Romance, enchantment and the beauty of nature have been part of the world of Van Cleef & Arpels since its beginnings.

There is a reason why this maison sees time differently, using stories as a way of examining our relationship with its passage rather than adhering to the constraints of 12-hour markers and sweeping seconds. Van Cleef & Arpels’s romantic view of time is an integral part of its identity. Because as well as being a story about time, Van Cleef & Arpels’s story is also about love.

The maison evolved out of the marriage of Alfred Van Cleef and Estelle Arpels, both of whom came from families of jewellery merchants, in Paris in 1895. This was the Paris of the Belle Epoque about to give way to that of the Art Nouveau.

Georges-Eugène Haussmann had replaced the dark winding streets of the old Paris of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, with straight lines and wide boulevards. Gustave Eiffel was building his tower and the Lumière brothers were the first people to ever show a film. This was a new Paris of inspiration and opportunity; it was a time of advancement in art, architecture and technology, and these advances were reflected in the foundation of the maison and its passion for innovation, elegance and bejewelled beauty.

In this era of optimism, progress and artistic innovation, Paris subsequently attracted charismatic individuals from all over the world who took up residence at the Ritz, where, across the Place Vendôme, Van Cleef & Arpels opened its first boutique in 1906; a boutique whose first piece sold, according to the sales register, was a heart set with diamonds.

Timepieces followed in 1906, cementing Van Cleef & Arpels as a pioneer in both crafts, forging the synergy between high jewellery and haute horlogerie that continues today.

“The Poetic Complications collection perfectly embodies the Van Cleef & Arpels vision that time is not linear, but rather a poetic journey, made up of emotion and moments to remember,” explains Catherine Renier, president and chief executive of Van Cleef & Arpels. “Through these watches, the maison offers a form of escape from the time of Cronos, an enchanted detour on which the minutes stop for a moment of contemplation.”

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BEAUTY

How a marriage, Paris and a new century made Van Cleef & Arpels the maison it is today. By Laura McCreddie-Doak

Second to none Lady Arpels Planétarium watch is an outstanding fusion of aesthetic poetry and technical mastery, thanks to its planetarium complication

These first two decades at the turn of the century were when Van Cleef & Arpels started to experiment with technical innovations; it’s a process of horological evolution that follows a direct lineage to the Poetic Complications pieces of today.

The double retrograde function, where two separate indicators move linearly to an end point before returning to their starting point, is a maison signature that first appeared in 1927 on a pocket watch on which a magician’s arms were used to indicate the hours and minutes.

Its gem expertise was also honed during these early years, with exquisitely set cocktail timepieces such as the Cadenas watch, as well as the development of the Mystery Set technique in the 1930s, where the metal in which the gemstones were positioned seems to disappear under a sea of sparkle. It was also the period that defined its design language.

The influence of Japonisme, the Chinese art representations of nature, the shifting aesthetics of the period from Art Nouveau to the more stylised and abstract forms of Art Deco are all still present in its collections. The love of ballet and the world of dance comes from this period too. Long before Claude Arpels befriended legendary choreographer George Balanchine of the New York City Ballet, leading to a triptych of dances created by Balanchine in 1967 called Jewels, Louis Arpels would take his nephew Claude to the Opera Garnier to revel in the romance of ballet. It is a fitting discipline in which to seek inspiration because, like Van Cleef & Arpels’s Poetic Complications collection, all the viewer sees is the beauty of the creation – the effort needed to create the spectacle is all but hidden from view.

“Automaton watches are complex to make because they must reliably express the functions that indicate the passing of time,”

explains Rainer Bernard, head of watchmaking research and development for Van Cleef & Arpels. “Ours are even more complex because we add extra elements.

These watches are complex to create, but rewarding once they are finished and working beautifully

For example, the Lady Arpels Brise d’Eté watch features two butterflies in a garden, indicating the time by turns, while decoupling the butterflies from the time indication. This required its own power source and needed to meet its own technical requirements, without altering the precision of the time indication. These watches are complex to create, but very rewarding once they are finished and working beautifully.”

This complex dance of co-ordinating the most skilled in their respective arts is something that has been part of the maison since its inception. Today its exceptionally talented craftspeople are busy creating astonishing and arresting enchantments in time across ateliers in Paris and Geneva – alongside experienced experts in specific disciplines who bring their talent to these works.

Les Ateliers Horlogers de Van Cleef & Arpels, the maison’s atelier in Geneva, Switzerland, is where time itself turns into timeless poetry – a poetry drawn from the many skilled hands dedicated to achieving the heights of technical excellence and craftmanship. It’s a poetry also drawn from the jewels, gems and precious metals embedded in each manufacture.

Here, traditional crafts meet a spirit of invention that is as compelling and as delicate as the spectacle of time created on the dials of each watch. Together, all these core elements form the ecosystem that results in the beauty and elegance of the Poetic Complications collection.

This is what makes Van Cleef & Arpels so unique. Everything it creates is about time as a romantic concept – something to cherish because of the moments it affords us, whether that is noticing the flutter of a butterfly’s wing, being swept away on the pirouette of a dancer or remembering your first kiss.

There is a lightness to every story its dials tell, even if the philosophical questions it asks us to contemplate while looking at them are anything but.

Every model in the Van Cleef & Arpels Poetic Complications collection asks of us just one important thing: to live in time and take a moment to enjoy it.

Collection

Ballet has always been an important source of inspiration for the maison, and this is one of the first of its Ballerina brooches. It is also an art form that Van Cleef & Arpels has supported throughout its history. In recent years it has facilitated the creation of contemporary works as well as, through its Dance Reflections programme, globally supporting dance companies and institutions.

HOW THE STORY OF TIME CAME TO LIFE

Horology rooted in creativity and the highest level of precision results in beautifully crafted scenes unfolding through time

When Van Cleef & Arpels started making watches in the 1900s, it brought to the world ‘des bijoux qui donnent l’heure’, or ‘jewels that tell the time’, writes Laura McCreddie-Doak

It is a theme and purpose indicative of the maison’s desire to not see watches as merely functional objects but as jewels that are as precious as time itself. Nowhere is that philosophy more evident than in its Poetic Complications collection. Each timepiece is a story brought to life by the talents of skilled craftspeople. This is watchmaking in a class of its own; one that elevates emotion and romance over mere mechanics, turning the art of telling the time into an act of transformative poetry.

“The poetry of time is telling time by telling a story and not just through the traditional means of watchmaking,” says Rainer Bernard, head of watchmaking research and development. He and the team are the magicians behind these intricate creations. “By depicting a garden whose flowers open and close, or a shooting star you can actually see on the dial – it’s a secret way of telling time. You must hold the poetic key

We rely on the creativity of every designer, engineer, craftsperson and watchmaker

and pause to read the time. At first glance, a magnificent scene is revealed. Then a second look shows the beauty of passing time.”

The Poetic Complications dials tell a story, but they are also meditations on moments in time. Each watch acts as a reminder that romance exists in the everyday as well as in the exceptional. But what is particularly exceptional is the way these watches are made and the way the watchmakers at Van Cleef & Arpels manipulate mechanics and material science in order to create these poetic worlds in miniature.

“The artistic aspect is central to all our projects,” says Bernard. “I tend to speak of it as a collaboration among creative people: the studio, along with the technical experts in the watchmaking workshops in Geneva, the métiers d’art the mains d’or of the high-jewellery workshops. We rely on the creativity of every designer, engineer, craftsperson and watchmaker to bring our pieces to life without compromise. All these métiers working together is what brings them to life.”

It makes sense then that, at Van Cleef & Arpels, technology is at the service of creativity. Each timepiece starts with a creative idea rooted in one of the maison’s worlds, be that love stories, ‘Poetic Astronomy’, ‘Enchanting Nature’ or ballet and fairies. Its experts in research and development and its engineers then have to find a mechanical solution to bring this creative vision to life using specific mechanisms and bespoke complications.

This is the quality that sets Van Cleef & Arpels apart from other watchmakers – it will find that solution however long it takes. “For the Lady Arpels Brise d’Eté watch, we asked, ‘How do you portray the wind within a watch?’” says Bernard. “We worked for four years to recreate the slight, natural sway of the flowers.” It is not unusual to completely discard a work-inprogress and start again if the current technological approach isn’t working.

Take, for example, the latest in the Pont des Amoureux series, which started with two lovers who kiss on a bridge at noon and midnight, that Van Cleef & Arpels unveiled in 2010.

and invention that goes in to developing the watch’s mechanics and grisaille enamel artistry, left

A moment of fleeting romance created by using a retrograde function, where the hands – the man and woman – do not make a complete turn of the dial, but instead return to their starting points and begin running again after covering the entire measurement segment, which here is the bridge.

The design for 2025’s Lady Arpels Bal des Amoureux Automate watch features two young Parisians meeting in a guinguette a 19th-century open-air dance café with fairy lights and cobblestones. The stars are on a retrograde and when they align at noon and midnight the lovers lean in, holding hands, and kiss for three minutes. To do this, Van Cleef & Arpels developed a regulator to control the speed of the pair’s movements, using force to slow them down – a technique more commonly found in minute repeaters – in order for the motion of the hand, arm and hip to be smooth. Another automaton function controls the kiss, which lasts for three minutes, when the stars align. It is also an on-demand function should you want them to kiss on a whim. This additional detail required special care to ensure it didn’t affect the retrograde for the stars.

All that innovation, coupled with the time it takes to assemble, was dedicated to the simple, beautiful moment of a lovers’ kiss.

The skills required to conjure these worlds that inhabit 38mm cases are equally impressive and innovative.

“Watchmaking offers a wonderful opportunity to invent new techniques while enriching traditional crafts,” says Bernard.

“We have especially deepened our knowledge of the enamelling techniques.” There are more than 15 different techniques

The art of grisaille enamelling

This rare craft was popular on watches in the 17th century and was particularly prominent in Geneva. Van Cleef & Arpels has been instrumental in reviving this technique. The process involves using a fine brush to apply layers of colour, often starting with the darker tones and gradually building up to the lighter shades, with each colour requiring a specific firing temperature.

mastered in the enamel workshop. Van Cleef & Arpels doesn’t just use the more commonplace techniques such as champlevé or cloisonné it has also mastered those that are more complex. This is because the craftspeople who are trained in-house at Van Cleef & Arpels spend three years in the maison’s own enamelling school and four in its engraving and sculpting school. It takes them 10 years to become experts.

This dedication to the craft is evident in every piece – it is why Van Cleef & Arpels’s dials may feature grisaille enamel, first used in Limoges in the 16th century, that creates a play of light and dark on the dial, or why you’ll see delicate long grass or butterfly wings constructed using plique-à-jour which uses enamel in the way glass is used in stained church windows. The exquisite vallonné relief work adds depth and texture to the design through more elaborate metalworking techniques, creating hill-like reliefs from indentations cut into the base, and then using the champlevé technique to create intricate structures. The vallonné technique brings an undulation to the designs, as seen in the flowers on the Lady Arpels Brise d’Eté

THE ANATOMY OF A WATCH

The Lady Arpels Brise d’Eté timepiece showcases the talent, innovation and craft Van Cleef & Arpels has in its atelier

Istarted with a sketch of large-headed flowers on a delicate stem, writes Laura McCreddieDoak A flower that is uncommon in nature, but which looked beautiful when drawn for a watch dial. “When I first saw it, I had to think for a moment,” says Rainer Bernard, head of watchmaking research and development at Van Cleef & Arpels. “I had to ask, ‘Is this possible mechanically?’ No, but can we invent a system to make it happen? Maybe.”

Any other maison would ask the designer to go back to the drawing board. Van Cleef & Arpels is no ordinary maison.

Bernard and the team embraced the challenge and, over the succeeding four years, would find a way of bringing it to life.

“We wanted to create a garden in summer, in morning light, with butterflies and delicate flowers moving in a breeze,” he says when asked what the original idea was for the timepiece.

“It was about poetry, about showing how precious these fleeting moments are. The maison also wanted to see if we

On point Painting in enamel for a detail of the Lady Arpels

could create, mechanically, the effect of a breeze through the flowers.”

This may be whimsical, bending gear trains and escape wheels to the service of a story, but as Bernard explains, when it comes to bringing these dials to life there is no blueprint; this is high-level mechanics. “We don’t have a book for our complications. We have to invent them ourselves,” he says. For this summer garden, that meant working out not only how to create the irregular movement of the flowers when animated, but also how to move those top-heavy blooms on stalks too fragile to bear their weight. To do this, the team realised that in order for the flowers to move, they couldn’t use the stem. Instead they would have to find a way to manipulate the blooms instead. And this being Van Cleef & Arpels, it all had to remain hidden in order to maintain the illusion. “We created an automaton that sat under the base of the flower and pushed it,” says Bernard. “We made the flower move, not the stem.”

That’s not the only technical marvel. Van Cleef & Arpels’s Poetic Complications watches are works of art, but they are also precise. “It takes 10 seconds for the butterfly to do a tour of the garden,” says Bernard. “It wouldn’t make sense for it to return to its previous position, so it comes to rest 10 seconds from where it started, and therefore it doesn’t lose time.” To do this Bernard and the team had to create the gearing from scratch. The result is breathtakingly romantic. When the pusher at eight o’clock is pressed, the garden springs to life – flowers sway in the breeze in a graceful yet irregular motion, while the butterflies float around the outside. It is magical, elegant and playful.

As well as mechanical innovation, Van Cleef & Arpels has always led the way when it comes to finding new ways to build on traditional crafts, particularly enamelling. For the flowers, the maison used the vallonné enamelling method to add a sense of sculptural depth and subtle nuance. “It was a technique invented by Van Cleef & Arpels,” says Bernard. “We had to create a specific oven to heat the enamel for 10 hours at a consistent temperature.” If that wasn’t technical enough, these sculptural flowers are also set with spessartite garnets, which is incredibly tricky to do due to the strong surface tension of the enamel.

To adorn the blooms, conical-shaped holes were created in the flowers set with the garnets before being reheated so that the enamel flowed back around the precious stones.

I had to ask, is this possible mechanically? No, but can we invent a system to make it happen? Maybe

and tsavorite garnets, and an interchangeable

“The base for all our creativity is curiosity,” says Bernard when asked how the maison devises these complex solutions in order to make the dewdrops glisten on sculpted enamel petals.

“We always design our watches to hide the mechanics. Even when you turn the watch over, the oscillating weight is there to hide the movement.”

Sleight of hand is the essence of Van Cleef & Arpels. These may function as timepieces, but they are not traditional watches. They are works of art and high craft, with time itself at their heart, its mechanics discretely hidden from view.

“Since the foundation of the maison, creativity has always been a central aspect of its identity,” say Bernard. “We explore new ideas and stories all the time, and to bring them to life we innovate. But we never develop a new technique without knowing what to do with it later. Innovation is part of the creative process to realise a story. Our innovations of

casing, above

today are therefore always influencing our creations of tomorrow.”

Craft, tradition and innovation combine to ensure that Van Cleef & Arpels exists in a class of one. This is a maison that has been recognised 15 times by the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève, the Oscars of the watch industry – including eight wins for Poetic Complications – with watches unlike any others. It has created timepieces that indicate the hour with opening flower heads, or feature a miniature recreation of planetary movements across the skies in real time. It has been awarded for an automaton on which gold and enamel lily pads float on rock crystal and chalcedony water that ripples as if stirred by a breeze, recreating the tender courtship of two lovebirds. The stunning Fontaine aux Oiseaux automaton took a team of experts in 20 fields 25,500 hours to create. There are timepieces with fluttering butterflies, the speed of the wing movements dictated by the wearer’s movements. It is a level of creativity most brands do not dream about, let alone attempt to replicate.

“To bring a story to life, we combine jewellery and watchmaking techniques, especially a number of selected métiers d’art at which the maison excels,” says Bernard, when asked what sets Van Cleef & Arpels apart from other maisons. “This idea is not new for us because the process of creation is similar to that of our high-jewellery pieces. Technology serves creativity; it allows poetry to express itself.”

Maybe that is the real difference between Van Cleef & Arpels and other watchmakers – while they are competing to fill their dials and cases with complex constructions that are front and centre, this maison turns its focus on how to turn time into poetry, and in doing so bring a dose of wonder into the world.

Deep dive into the Poetry of Time at vancleefarpels.com

Since the foundation of the maison, creativity has been a central aspect of its identity