At this year’s Watches and Wonders, Van Cleef & Arpels showcased its mastery in blending traditional métiers d’art with innovative storytelling through its latest watch collections. Nicolas Bos, now CEO of Richemont group, spoke to Tatler about how the maison continues to champion the intricate craftsmanship that has defined its identity since its inception. Bos, who has long been fascinated by the art of jewellery and its application in watchmaking, discusses how these age-old techniques are meticulously integrated into its timepieces, ensuring each creation not only tells time but narrates a story.
Don’t miss: Hublot unveils Arsham Droplet, a pocket watch that redefines cool
Van Cleef & Arpels has once again used traditional métiers d’art decorative techniques for poetic storytelling this year at Watches and Wonders. How did you manage to bring jewellery crafts as championed by the maison to the world of watches?Métiers d’art [have been] at the heart of Van Cleef & Arpels since the early days; it’s [always been] an area that fascinated me. When I had the opportunity to join [the company] some time ago, I knew about the creations and the historical aspect of jewellery; but it’s [only] when you get to work in a workshop with the craftsmen that you start to understand what it takes, where it comes from, how complex or rich that world of craftsmanship is—and also, quite importantly, how exciting the opportunities are to continue to develop them, to make them relevant, to apply them to new projects and new creations. The great craftsmen are always challenging themselves—sometimes on elements that you cannot even see. That’s part of the process. So that’s pretty much the culture of the jewellery workshop.
When it came to watches, we redeveloped the [way] Van Cleef & Arpels expresses watches. It’s immediately an aspect that we felt was very important and interesting because, by nature, jewellery is about telling stories through figurative elements and representation, so it felt obvious and natural to try to express the same stories in the world of watches.
The Apparition des Baies automaton (Photo: courtesy of Van Cleef & Arpels)
What is the biggest challenge in using jewellery-making techniques on watches?You have a limited space when you’re working on a watch dial. You have far less three- dimensionality than when you work on a necklace or a brooch, and there are a lot of limitations on what you can do with stone cutting or traditional jewellery craft.
Techniques around enamelling, around metal sculpture, around engraving miniature paintings, we have quite a spectrum of them. We [have] tried progressively [for almost] 20 years to revive them and to redevelop them. The grisaille, for instance, which we use on the Lover’s Bridge watch, is a very old technique of enamelling from the 16th century that we not only reinvented but rediscovered and updated. And this is what we try to continue to do: to have a diversity of crafts that is as wide as possible so that the novelties tell rich, complex and enchanting stories, despite the limited [space] that you have on the dial.
Can you give us an example from this year of taking a previously launched watch and elevating it to the next level?A watch that we launched in 2008, Day and Night. At that time, it was seen as very important in our collection … because in a historic way, it was [our] signature version of a traditional watchmaking complication: the day and night indication. Traditionally, a night indication is a very small indication somewhere on the dial and, at the time, we wanted to make it the core story so that it would take up the entire space of the watch and enable us to play with [techniques such as] stone setting. So we made it even more refined, detailed and richer [rather than just indicated] in a window; [it was showcased as a] design, and [we added] an automatic movement to [exceed] expectations of traditional watchmaking.
Another one is [the Lady Arpels Brise D’Été Watch]. We love night skies and nocturnal atmospheres and here, we wanted to go a bit on the other side and to create something very light, very fresh, quite bright and with the idea of a summer day with a gentle wind, and to try to see how we could combine some techniques for the rotation [of the hours]; that was really the starting point.
What inspired you to choose the summer breeze as a theme specifically to create the Lady Arpels Brise D’Été watch?It’s really a feeling [that we wanted to portray]: the representation of seasons and the vision of time that’s associated with the cycles of nature are quite central [to the themes used at the maison]. So, of course, you associate the different seasons with different feelings, different temperatures, different atmospheres. Once you start with the idea and the feeling you want to [recreate through the designs, there is] a dialogue between the watchmaker, craftsman and the designer. A lot of the movements in watchmaking are about speed. So, to [create a complication] that’s going to be random, slow and quiet, [yet creative, accurate and innovative] is quite a technical challenge that the teams liked to address.
If you had the chance to choose an alternate profession, who would you be today?I would be a writer.
NOW READ
Why did these Chinese-inspired art deco Cartier clocks fetch over US$2.3 million in Hong Kong?