Laura McCready-Doak
“There are no books that explain complications. We have to invent them ourselves,” says Rainer Bernard, head of research and development at Van Cleef & Arpels. He’s talking about the Breeze d’Ete, a mechanical masterpiece that won the “Ladies’ Complication” award at the 2024 Grand Prix de Genève Watches (GPHG). The dial depicts a summer garden with beautiful blue flowers and butterflies. Press the pusher at 8 o’clock and your garden will come to life. Flowers sway in the wind with graceful, irregular movements, and butterflies flit around the outside, their shapes stopping exactly 10 seconds later around the dial. It was around the time when anime started.
To do this, Bernard and his team had to build the gear from scratch. “We had to invent a mechanism to create irregular movements in the flowers,” he says. “Then we had to figure out how to move the flowers because the flower heads were too big for the stems.” All of these are known as Van Cleef & Arpels’ “poetic complications.” It starts as an idea and then becomes a sketch. In this case, the designer drew a balanced, beautiful and rich flower on a thin stem. This is a proportion that does not occur naturally. Rather than send a designer to draw something more practical, Barnard thought, “Could this be possible mechanically?” “The answer was no,” he explains. “So we had to invent a system to make this happen.”
The system was to create a cup under the flower so that an automaton would push it. Therefore, the flowers, not the stems, are the ones that move. This is Van Cleef & Arpels, and to preserve the magic, the mechanisms that make the movement happen need to be hidden. “I love going to the opera, but I don’t want to watch cable,” Bernard jokes. All this innovation – and that’s before we even start talking about how the Maison invented a way to turn enamel into a material that can be used for three-dimensional sculpture, and that this watch has “emotional complexity.” It will be talked about as such. ;This is a rather detestable phrase used to describe a complication that has no purpose in keeping time.
This is really ironic. Because, if I’m going to be pedantic about this, most complications have no use for timing. The tourbillon was created to counteract the effect of gravity on the watch’s regulators, which is caused by carrying the watch in your pocket. Minute repeaters are designed to tell the time even in the dark. If you want to get really perverse about this, everything a watch does, from telling you how much time has passed on a chronograph to actually telling the time, can be done more accurately with your phone, and essentially becomes useless. Why can it be argued that while tourbillons and perpetual calendars are held up as examples of technological prowess, lovers kissing on a bridge at noon and midnight is considered merely an “emotional thing” (and This person will too), depicting the complications and functions of watchmaking through the male gaze.
Adrian Bachmann, senior designer at Christopher Ward, agrees: “Some brands have introduced some kind of mechanical innovation or complication into their women’s watches, but it always feels like an interesting flair.” He speaks as if he is proving it. “While there have been some great developments, such as Van Cleef, it still feels like a ‘Barbie Girl’ design and lacks depth. But who said butterflies and flowers belong to women, and gears belong to men? ”
The disconnect may be that because we cannot see the gears that move butterflies and flowers, we tend not to appreciate the mechanical feats that go into their creation. Van Cleef & Arpels has gone to great lengths to maintain the magic, with the rotor intentionally obtrusive so you can’t see anything through the sapphire caseback. The same is not true of Chanel’s latest contribution to its in-house Caliber collection, which can be admired in all its monochrome glory.
Caliber 6 is the Maison’s first automatic machine. It took five years to develop and features 355 components, but most of the components, the cams that drive the automaton, remain hidden so as not to detract from the movement’s sparse aesthetics. This is an animated version of a fun cartoon mademoiselle trying to manipulate a mannequin’s clothes with scissors. It may now seem natural for Chanel to combine haute couture and haute horlogerie. The collection also includes a breathtaking watch featuring a rotating mannequin to Al Bowlley’s “My Woman” and is called Couture O’Clock. But it took a long time for that to happen. Let’s get rid of the stigma of being a “fashion watch” and be taken seriously.
Never mind that it developed its first tourbillon in collaboration with the likes of Audemars Piguet before establishing its own manufacturing facility in La Chaux-de-Fonds. Then-CEO Nicolas Baud and his other half of Renault et Papi, a company founded to create complex movements for the brand, which is a famous supercomplication manufacturer and is now owned by Renault et Papi. As a personal collaboration with Giulio Papi, we created the Retrograde Mysteries, also featured on the J12. Audemars Piguet – and enlisted the help of Romain Gauthier to develop Caliber 1, the in-house movement housed in the gorgeous Jump Hour men’s watch.
For years, Chanel was ignored by watch enthusiasts as a fashion and jewelry brand that only made watches. It took several calibers before it was taken seriously, one of which had electroplated wheels. This is due in no small part to innovations such as covering the tourbillon with a diamond-set camellia, observing the rotating flower instead of a cage, and using an automaton to animate the fashion designer. . Some might argue that this undermines the actual technical wizardry that is going on. “I never understood why so many women’s complications weighed heavily on flowers and fairies,” says Rebecca, co-founder of Struthers London, author and first-ever PhD in horology. Dr. Struthers says. “Sure, they’re beautiful, but no matter how impressive they are, I’ll never wear them. I guess they know their market well, but one of the most complicated watches in the world is for women. It was designed for her, and it is striking that there are no flowers in it. It’s a real shame that Marie Antoinette wasn’t alive to see it!”
Apart from Marie Antoinette’s pocket watch, there are also watches with rotating stones as hour markers (Gucci’s G Timeless Planetarium) and watches that use butterfly wings and an hour disc that rotates counterclockwise to tell the time (Fashion). Let’s talk about Bergé’s Compliqué Butterflies. Like minute repeaters and tourbillons? Perhaps these complexities are more impressive because there is no blueprint. In Barnard’s words, just because the “way” something works is “hidden behind a piece of jewelry” doesn’t mean it gets the same respect as if a giant gyrotourbillon were front and center. Shouldn’t it be done?
Perhaps the problem here is that, as Struthers explains, “women’s watches are simply not taken as seriously, regardless of their level of complexity.” And that is perhaps the depressing reality of it all. When you watch a panel, listen to a podcast, or watch a discussion on a YouTube channel, it’s usually a group of men talking. To put it exaggeratedly, these are men who ignore the ingenuity necessary to tell the time by the seemingly random way a flower opens. Please answer. In case you’re interested, you’ll need a wheel to charge the spring inside the barrel, which will power the animation. This barrel uses a centrifugal regulator to control how quickly the flowers open and close, and the cycle can take up to four seconds. This work is based on Carl von Linnaeus’s “Plant Philosophy.” In it, the Swedish botanist writes about gardens where flowers open and close to tell the time. Indeed, it is as impressive as a constant force escapement.
