When I first interviewed Philippe Delhotal, the creative director of Hermès Horloger, on the brand’s newest watch, I was stymied by his insistence on the words ‘cut’ and ‘shape’. To begin with, the watch in question is named the Hermès Cut. It takes its name from two neat notches sliced at the sides, which are finished with a contrasting mirror polish to the rest of the case’s brushed satin. And in talking about the Cut, both the brand and Delhotal keep referencing its shape. It is neither a round watch, nor is it square or rectangular.
It seemed, at the time, like simple ideas behind what is meant to be the French luxury house’s new signature sports timepiece for women. It is the first women’s model at the brand to be fitted with an automatic mechanical movement produced inhouse and dispenses with any house references to equestrianism or leather. In essence, the design is meant to bring its women’s offering up to par with the horological ambitions of the brand. For a creation so ambitiously positioned, would mere ‘cut’ and ‘shape’ suffice?
The sense of an answer came when the brand flew journalists and watch influencers from around the world to a tiny island in Greece called Tinos for an adventure dubbed Shapes of Time. Part of the Cyclades archipelago, Tinos is a sleepy haven set in a primal environment: a never-ending spread of terraced hills, upon which are buttressed small villages and a nascent tourist industry, against an endless backdrop of sun and sea.
The miracle of Tinos is a natural resource that has been cherished, worked and mastered since antiquity: marble. Nearly every touch of civilisation and settlement here features marble. It has been quarried, cut, sculpted and worked into the buildings, the furniture and even gift shop trinkets. It’s said that nearly every Tinian family—the latest population census puts the island’s inhabitants at just under 9,000—has a connection to the marble trade.
On this four-day trip, we visited two disused quarries. The first was Koumela’s quarry in the northern reaches of the island. Here, the marble is signature Tinian green and a placid pond lies amid imposing walls of perpendicularly cut stone. The experimental performance artist Alessandro Sciarroni staged a site-specific performance, with singers appearing on steps of marble. Each singer added layers of harmony to a growing song composed by Aurora Bauzà and Pere Jou.
Set to a 4/4 time signature at a largo tempo, roughly a count a second, the singers echoed, with a rising crescendo, the words ‘time, turns, waits, turns’. Essentially, an artistic expression of how Hermès views the unceasing, uncaring march of time with a sensitive, poetic bent. Surrounded by the right-angled marks of marble extracted decades and centuries ago, it was a reminder that the most mechanical and laborious of crafts have in them a naturally elegiac quality.
The second quarry we visited was located near Pyrgos, an idyllic spot dubbed the marble village. This is a village in which the floors, walls and tombs are made of carved marble. The quarry itself is a disused place—unlisted on Google Maps—that had previously operated for over three centuries since the 1600s. In its present form, it has been turned into an amphitheatre, where Hermès put together a marble-cutting workshop led by the artist Giorgos Palamaris. English-born with a Tinian father, Palamaris is a graduate of marble craftsmanship from the island’s preparatory school of fine arts—an institution that teaches traditional sculpture techniques for art students who go on to study in Athens.
Here, a disarmingly difficult task. We are each given a slab of marble set on a table, a pair of sturdy gloves, a hammer and a set of chisels. The assignment is to play with, experiment and encounter the material. We do our best to chip away and work on an uneven piece of rock to reveal glistening white marble and to shape it into straight lines.
Fifteen minutes of labour quickly proves futile. The chisel must be angled at roughly 45 degrees to the marble. One needs to find the grain of the stone, then work with it not against it. Not every surface of the rock is giving; certain angles and ridges yield more fruitful cuts. To say nothing of the physical strength required to drive the hammer onto the chisel and into the rock. Here, another elegant reminder: the act of cutting, though simple in theory, is anything but.
What’s astounding about this whole experience in Tinos is that Hermès spent, by my count, no more than 10 minutes in total talking about its new watch, the Cut. At the amphitheatre-quarry, creative director Delhotal was on hand to briefly explain the conceptual connections of this Cycladic island and his new design. “Shapes are dear to Hermès,” he said. “They originate from nature and from raw materials we craft shapes.” As it relates to the Cut, its eponymous detail on the sides is achieved by machine for precision, then finished and polished by hand for beauty.
Then, he took part in the cutting of marble. By the end, I had achieved a nondescript sliver of an edged corner on my slab of stone. When I went to peek at Delhotal’s, he had carved, among other things, the likeness of Hermès’s circular Ex-Libris logo motif into the marble. One evening, the house’s artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas joined us for dinner. He gave a speech that, unsurprisingly at that point, only mentioned the Cut in passing. Rather, Dumas talked about this adventure in Tinos as an expression of the house’s passion in watchmaking, art he had seen recently and the emotive aspect of their creation.
Surrounded by untouched, almost primordial nature, the questions I had of cut and shape resolved themselves. A new flagship timepiece is well and good, but Hermès has made itself a pinnacle of luxury precisely because of the oblique way it does things. Emotion, artistry and craftsmanship lead the way at this Parisian house, not a frantic rush to market.
On Tinos, one could not escape the sense of a centuries-long tradition of sculpture and lines, of cleaving beauty out of the mundane. And not just in a locally Greek manner, but the wider, more poignant connection of Grecian antiquity as the cradle of western civilisation. It is a thread of history and lineage that connects us all and which this house has distilled, with elegance and dignity, into a creation that sits humbly on the wrist.
The July/August ‘Cravings’ issue of Vogue Singapore is now available online and in-store.
