The world of watchmaking turns on a single event held annually. For one week, nearly every major brand is gathered in the Palexpo convention centre in Geneva for Watches & Wonders. Many come from the neighbouring regions of Switzerland, which is the home and hub of the trade. All this to say that in fine watchmaking, the world condenses and even the smallest shifts make big waves.
In previous years, this fair was a squarely industry event. But times have changed. Interest in watches and watchmakers—on both ends of the casual to connoisseur scale—has only grown. Which is why Watches and Wonders was, for the second time this year, open to the public. Brands and makers have, correspondingly, caught on to the reality that their work is not just a niche of luxury any longer. With it, a quiet but certain acknowledgment that some degree of spectacle and surprise is necessary.
That came through in a number of novel designs that have in them strokes of audacity. None of these creations are meant for the mainstream, but demonstrate instead the passion and creativity that is driving the imaginations of watchmaking brands.
Cartier’s time in reverse
Cartier has a bounty of icons in its modern collection. But the watch with the greatest history is perhaps the Santos. The first modern wristwatch created in 1904, it popularised the style of wearing a watch on the wrist among men and essentially invented the whole category. Now, the French maison is proving that even the most historical of watches is not above a sly wink and a humorous twist.
Enter the Santos-Dumont Rewind, a gorgeous creation cased in platinum, with a ruby cabochon-set crown and entrancing carnelian dial. So far, so normal. But observe the dial and the movements of the apple-shaped hands, and you’ll see that this Rewind has its Roman numerals arranged in reverse. Its hands, correspondingly, move backwards to keep time.
The Santos-Dumont Rewind is powered by the calibre 230 MC, a modified version of one of the brand’s slim, manualwinding movements. On the caseback, the signature of the watch’s namesake Alberto Santos-Dumont is engraved twice—once in mirrored reverse, naturally.
Vacheron Constantin’s perfume watch
Vacheron Constantin unveiled a novel design this year: the world’s first perfume watch. The concept timepiece, named Pleats of Time, was developed in a three-way concert between the brand, its ambassador the haute couture designer Yin Yiqing, and master perfumer Dominique Ropion.
It’s a high-concept imagining of how three different ‘haute’ fields—horlogerie, couture and parfumerie—can converge. The embroidered strap is where the magic resides: pebbly capsules house the fragrance’s juice. It’s designed to respond to the movements and the heat of being worn on the wrist, and slowly releases the scent throughout the day.
The perfume by Ropion—a legend of the fragrance industry—is a mineral and marine duet. It has powdery, wintry notes of honeysuckle and immortelle, sunny citrus notes, and the smoky, incense effects of olibanum, myrrh and opoponax. “A fragrance that would be universal,” described Ropion in press notes, “like time itself.”
For Yin, the concept of an ephemeral scent encapsulated on a watch was to “accept the passage of time in order to breathe and be receptive to wonder”. As to the watch itself, the Pleats of Time is a modified Égérie that is simultaneously more and less detailed than production models. The dial is simplified in the sense that there are no hour markers. But it’s also intensely decorated: a dreamy, pleated lilac mother-of-pearl dial, 92 diamonds set into its bezel, and a moonphase subdial with pink gold moons and mother-of-pearl clouds.
Van Cleef & Arpels’ fanciful automatons
The rarefied name of Van Cleef & Arpels tends to summon an impression of feminine, elegant jewellery—more often than not with motifs such as flora, fauna, fairies or ballerinas. What’s lesser known about this Parisian high jeweller is the esoteric, arcane passion it has nurtured in the field of automaton table clocks.
This year, the maison unveiled two new automaton designs. The first, named Apparition des Baies, is a tropical bouquet of precious metals and gemstones. At the top of its threetiered structure sits an orb, formed by rose gold fronds with multihued airbrushed leaves. When activated, a dulcet melody plays to accompany a magical sequence of events. First, these branches pivot, rotate and lower into formation like a splayed fern. Inside, a bird of white gold, diamonds and sapphires is revealed. It flaps its wings, rises into the air and lands softly before being safely ensconced once more when the leaves fold back into place.
The second automaton leans into the house’s penchant for fantasy. Named Bouton d’Or, it draws as much from the paillette motif of its jewellery as it does from a house tradition of crafting precious fairies. It has a similar three-tiered structure as before, but the star of the show is entirely different. In its closed form, a ball of rose gold, laced with four crisscrossing lines of diamonds, hoists a bristling bouquet of finely polished gold discs.
When activated, these branches open to reveal a vivacious stage of colour. The undersides of those gold stems and discs are lacquered, and there are flowers with lacquered petals and precious gems set into the ‘stigma’. In the centre, a gold fairy twirls in flight on beating wings of plique-à-jour enamel that look like stained glass windows, clasping a briolette sapphire in her hands and outfitted in a dress trimmed with blue lacquer. Behold, a fairy queen holding court, staging a mesmerising, enchanted dance. The vision it creates is otherworldly—and there is, indeed, almost nothing out there quite like it.
Piaget’s super-slim marvel
There’s an arms race in watchmaking in the area of thinness. For years now, several brands have dedicated themselves to the deceptively simple competition of who can make the thinnest watch. An ultra-thin watch, by itself, is no mean feat. One of the pioneers is Swiss maker Piaget, which broke historic ground in 1957 when it introduced the Calibre 9P on its Altiplano timepieces. At two millimetres thin—the thickness of a coin—it was the thinnest mechanical movement in the world at the time and opened the doors for a host of super slim designs to develop.
In recent times, the competition has obviously caught up. But that doesn’t mean that Piaget is ready to relinquish its position just yet. For proof, look to the Altiplano Ultimate Concept Tourbillon, the house’s latest piece of technical and mechanical bravado and wizardry.
The Altiplano Ultimate Concept Tourbillon is, watch and all, just two millimetres thin. There are ultra-thin contenders with a lower figure, perhaps, but not without the flying tourbillon complication that Piaget has managed to fit in there. And it’s a complication with, well, a complication. The implementation of a tourbillon demands about a fourth more power from the movement—in practical terms, that would have meant a much shorter power reserve.
To counter this power issue, the watch was almost entirely redesigned from its predecessor, which is not even a decade old. The mechanics were integrated into the cobalt PVD-treated case of the watch. New machines were devised to fabricate the extraordinarily minuscule parts, which are diamond-polished and chamfered to its finish by hand. And in several places, traditional pins are replaced by ball bearings that facilitate movement. An accumulation of tiny, monumental changes that ensured that this super slender flying tourbillon timepiece can still boast a respectable 40-hour power reserve.
The June ‘Impact’ issue of Vogue Singapore is now available for sale online and at newsstands.
