It’s a kind of magic

Don’t be fooled by their whimsical looks – Van Cleef & Arpels’ timepieces are miniature marvels of mechanical engineering. By James Gurney

Van Cleef & Arpels is a jeweller first, of that there is no doubt. More than that, the brand cultivates a sense of whimsy that is about as far from serious horology as you can imagine, and would be pure kitsch in lesser hands.

Nevertheless, the Poetic Complications strand that the maison has developed over the past decade or so is a truly astonishing piece of work, and a lot more in keeping with the brand than you might think.

As Nicolas Bos, the company’s urbane and slightly bookish CEO and president, put it recently: “We have a fascination for mechanics and we are attentive to everything that exists in horology, not because we want to rival the purely horological performance that others master, but to tell our own story. We set out to make magic from mechanics.”

VC&A is now introducing a new Love Stories collection featuring updated versions of the Pont des Amoureux timepiece that originally caught the watch world’s attention in 2010 with both its exquisite surface detail and the horological fireworks beneath.

The hours and minutes are represented by two figures facing each other on a moonlit bridge and moving steadily closer to each other with the passage of time until they finally touch at 11.59 before jumping back to the beginning. While the mechanism behind this – the jumping retrograde hand – was not new, the level that Van Cleef took it to was unprecedented. Slimmer, more precise and cleverer than previous retrograde movements, the watch was designed in partnership with Jean-Marc Wiederrecht’s Agenhor, a specialist in complicated movements based in Geneva.

With a standard retrograde movement, such as in the 2008 Lady Arpels Féerie (a ‘simple’ retrograde using the fairy’s wings and wand as hands), the two lovers may not touch properly, as it’s very difficult to synchronise the two hands exactly, so Wiederrecht had to come up with a hooking system to hold the lovers together until both were ready to jump back.

It’s a tiny detail but it illustrates the investment that VC&A was prepared to make into getting the watch exactly right. The new Pont des Amoureux includes a refinement that the brand should possibly have predicted the need for originally – a push-button that causes the lovers to meet on demand.

Since the launch of the Lady Arpels Féerie, VC&A has developed a whole strand of Poetic Complications, ranging from last year’s intriguing, piezoelectric-powered

The new Pont des Amoureux Hiver, with its moonlit bridge offset by frost and snow, price on application

Zodiac Lumineux watches up to a one-off, tabletop-sized automata featuring a jewelled fairy sitting on a lily-pad. And, increasingly, the maison is developing and producing these in-house at its miniature manufacture based in Geneva. But, as Bos says, the mechanical marvels exist to animate the magic on the surface. I suspect that part of the reason VC&A so clearly enjoys making these watches is that the dials provide such a different context for the designers and artisans; the Pont des Amoureux collection is a complete showcase of different techniques and crafts at the maison’s disposal. There are day and night versions of the watch, as well as seasonthemed models, each of which employs its own suite of métiers d'art. The original nighttime scene has a dark background over a ‘ blanc de Limoges’ enamel base on which the details are painted, including a gold-leaf star, while for the daytime version, a coloured grisaille enamel using pink and blue against a white background is utilised. The season-themed timepieces, meanwhile, feature carved and painted gold flowers and butterflies (to denote spring and summer), or trees (for autumn and winter), and the watches themselves are matched to snowset bracelets of diamonds and coloured sapphires and garnets. Such wonderment takes hours to produce – 30-40 for the enamel parts with multiple firings for each colour – but what really captivates about the Pont des Amoureux watches is the almost unique combination of cutting-edge horology (the cams for the retrograde are formed using cutting-edge LIGA, for example), craft skill and a manner that manages to be both romantic and stylish. vancleefarpels.com

The Pont des Amoureux collection is a complete showcase of different techniques and crafts at the maison’s disposal

Below: the Pont des Arts in Paris, one of the inspirations behind the collection. Right: the Pont des Amoureux Printemps, Eté and Automne models