Once Upon a Time: Van Cleef & Arpels’ Storytelling and Craft

Van Cleef & Arpels’ Nicolas Bos and Rainer Bernard explain why storytelling and craft are equally important to the maison.  

Van Cleef & Arpels’ watchmaking is quite unlike anyone else’s. The maison’s feet are firmly planted in its own unique world of magic, enchantment, poetry and fairy tales; and as a jewellery house first and foremost, its expression of watches is strongly rooted in métiers d’art. This might seem niche, with Van Cleef & Arpels treading its own decidedly feminine path, yet on the contrary, in recent years the brand has successfully captured the attention of both male and female collectors across several generations. 

This is something Nicolas Bos, CEO at Van Cleef & Arpels, has noticed. “I was talking about this with some of my designers,” he tells me as we chat at Watches & Wonders. “We’re seeing more and more men – and I think there’s probably an opportunity for us to develop stories that are maybe not necessarily feminine or masculine, but can be a bit more universal.”

In fact, he’s seen male clients gravitate towards the Pont des Amoureux (Lovers’ Bridge) and the Fairy watches. “Some pieces were designed as feminine watches, as they were conceived in the ’60s, when that distinction was more important,” says Bos. “But nowadays, it’s becoming more blurred and it’s nice that people can choose what they like, regardless of what people may think. And actually no one cares, because we’ve stopped identifying or classifying people according to what they wear. I think this is very, very positive.”

Although poetry and storytelling are at the heart of every Van Cleef & Arpels object, Bos insists that it isn’t with a person in mind. “We never try to design or create for one specific person,” he says. “It’s true that the nature of the house was very, very feminine, because we’re a jewellery house and for a century the people who were wearing our jewellery were mostly women. But the stories, by nature, have always been quite universal.”

Van Cleef & Arpels’ head of watchmaking research and development is Rainer Bernard, who’s probably the best person to ask about the inspirations behind this year’s charming creations, which include fairies drifting off
to sleep in caves and birds finding solace within flowers. “How do we create a Poetic Complication? We start with a story and it’s never just marketing,” he says, echoing Bos. “You can imagine me one weekend, going to a park next to my house and I see two butterflies swirling around each other, in spirals, flying through the whole garden for half an hour, but always spiralling like a love couple. How beautiful is that? And my colleague says, ‘Oh, but isn’t this a cool idea? Maybe we can use it for a new complication. Then someone else in the studio draws a quick sketch. And from that, we discuss how we can add some techniques … this is how we typically create at Van Cleef & Arpels.”

Bernard is describing the backstory to the Lady Arpels Brise d’Été, a Watches & Wonders highlight that celebrates a fresh summer morning with an on-demand animation module. On activation, the stems of the flowers delicately sway and two white- and yellow-gold butterflies rendered in plique-à-jour enamel flutter harmoniously around the dial. 

Van Cleef & Arpels’ vast archive provides endless inspiration, but there’s also a lot of inspiration that the team finds in nature and the world in general. “We love to talk about enchanted nature, poetic astronomy, love stories, fashion, ballerinas, dance and fairies,” says Bernard. “This is our world and we always, always start with stories.” 

Whereas authors pen enchanting tales with their writing instruments, Van Cleef & Arpels tells its stories with métiers d’art. Traditional watchmakers may use means of engraving and enamelling as decoration for the dial and the watch, Bos says that at Van Cleef & Arpels these are the “very central part of the watch itself. We look at these crafts the same way a manufacture looks at movements. And they’re often the starting point in a watch like ours, where the whole purpose of the métiers d’art is to tell the story.”

So important is this that the brand has now invented its own enamelling techniques – and all for the sake of enhancing its storytelling. The Lady Arpels Jour Enchanté – an absolute kaleidoscope of colour, technique and ornamentation – and the Lady Arpels Nuit Enchanté, with a rock-crystal dial, feature a new type of enamelling, called façonné, which can be sculpted into three-dimensional shapes and even set with stones. 

The ability to create a three-dimensional sculpture in enamel has long been a dream for Bernard. Enamelling has always been there: “We found in our documents that the first enamel watch was made in 1906, right at the beginning of the company,” he says, which makes it pertinent for the company to invest and perfect the craft. Not only can the team now create its own colours in-house, but after two years of intensive research and testing it’s discovered that the secret to sculpting enamel is in the way enamel is prepared, so it can take on new properties that allow it to be worked on without breaking. These new techniques are now awaiting patents.

“This is the fruit of our investment and our curiosity,” says Bernard. “Everything we do, from high jewellery to watchmaking, is based on craftsmanship, but we always stay within what’s important for the house.”

Bos is proud of his team’s achievement, and the recognition the brand has received. He hopes that soon, métiers d’art can be seen as a serious component of watchmaking. “Appreciation for high watchmaking took some time to develop. Now most people know what a minute repeater is, or what a perpetual calendar is, or what a tourbillon does. Twenty years ago, I’d say this was still very blurry,” he says. “So now, we’d like people to understand and know what plique-à-jour enamelling is, or grisaille, and how we use them. And you can like it or not, but I think that the culture of appreciating métiers d’art is there. It can be even more widespread, and that’s what we’re trying to do.” 

Header image: Façonnè enamelling at Van Cleef & Arpels