When a house specialises in watches and jewellery, the most challenging commitment isn’t combining the two, but doing so in a way that consistently causes eyes to widen, jaws to drop, and waitlists to grow. Van Cleef & Arpels is one of the few brands with such a high level of impact. Only one glance at the collection of Extraordinary Dials will explain why.
It fuses metiers d’art with the maison’s masterwork of jewellery and watchmaking, creating fantastical worlds that unfold above the wrist, telling stories of love, magic, and nature’s beauty. Imagine lovers meeting on the Pont des Arts under a blushing sunset, roses blooming fiercely in a Persian garden, or dancers recreating a pas de deux from Sleeping Beauty. Extraordinary Dials invites us to imagine time instead of simply measuring it.
A new addition is the Lady Arpels Nuit Enchante, the nighttime partner to Lady Arpels Jour Enchante, released last year as a limited edition. The latter depicts a fairy gathering flowers under the morning sun, while Nuit Enchante shows the serene aftermath. Among a cavern of shimmering crystals, the fairy rests on a bed of blooms she collected earlier while the moon and stars twinkle softly beyond her wings.
Every detail of this vista reveals the maison’s expertise. Rough sapphires make up the cave’s walls, not crystals. The night sky is rendered in grisaille enamel, a technique using monochrome shades to create delicate, light-infused imagery. The fairy is sculpted in white gold, with her wings crafted from plique-a-jour enamel to resemble stained glass with a pearlescent effect.
To create the flowers for this pair of watches, the house turned to faconne enamel, a new enamelling technique that took 16 months to perfect. A stainless-steel medium is poured with enamel and slowly whittled to form a 3D shape. The resulting micro-sculptures are then fired at low temperatures to relieve material tension before glazing at high temperatures to create a smooth, polished surface. Afterwards, each flower is set with a yellow sapphire while an off-centred rock crystal dial with rose gold hands and hour markers eventually draws the eye to the time.
Rainer Bernard, Director of Watchmaking Research and Development at Van Cleef & Arpels states, “The common denominator linking all our metiers d’art is a quest for excellence. This is demonstrated by the meticulous attention we pay to light and colour, which we consider fundamental. All of our creations play with light. We often spend hours deliberating on the blend of textures needed to produce the most exquisite reflection on polished, enamelled, or engraved surfaces. The same applies to colours.”
Lady Arpels Nuit Enchante’s “crystal caves” are a stunning example of this pursuit of perfection. Lapidaries from the maison selected sapphires that met the design’s specific shape and colour requirements. To preserve the cave’s rugged, natural aesthetic, the stones were intricately shaped to fit the original design as closely as possible. On the back of the 41-mm white gold case, further engraving and polishing techniques offer varied volumes, depicting another fairy gazing in awe at the night sky.
When Van Cleef & Arpels commits to making a dial extraordinary, you can count on it to do so fervently and with vibrant panache.
