When it comes to storytelling in watchmaking, few maisons weave narrative and craft as seamlessly as Van Cleef & Arpels. This year, the French jeweller turns its gaze to the orchard, unveiling two whimsical additions to its Perlée Extraordinaire collection: the Fruits Enchantés Myrtille and Framboise watches. Rather than technical showpieces alone, these creations feel like miniature allegories, time translated into berries ripening under an eternal sun.
Each dial is more painting than instrument. The maison’s innovation, façonné enamel, patented in 2023 after months of experimentation, allows artisans to sculpt enamel into the rounded forms of blueberries and raspberries.
The result is uncanny in its tactility: plump, light-catching fruit, their curves glazed until luminous. Around them, foliage appears in miniature brushstrokes against textured gold, while fairies, longstanding emblems of the maison, alight on the scene with diamond-set wings.
It is easy to forget, in an age of digital efficiency, that a watch can still function as a stage for métiers d’art. At Van Cleef’s Geneva workshops, enamellers, engravers, lapidaries and painters work side by side, investing as much as 300 hours in a single dial.
The Fruits Enchantés pieces demand a convergence of disciplines: high relief enamel, hand-sculpted gold, delicate miniature painting. The back of each case even hides an engraving, one with a butterfly, another with a ladybird, quiet nods to the hidden poetry of detail.
There is, of course, something inherently French about treating time not as a force to measure but as a story to tell. Since its founding in 1906, Van Cleef & Arpels has folded nature and imagination into its identity, from bejewelled fairies to florals that bloom on velvet boxes. The Fruits Enchantés watches continue that tradition with a gentle wink: nature, here, does not wither but remains eternally ripe.
Worn on the wrist, they are less about keeping punctuality than about carrying a fragment of wonder. To wear a raspberry dial, its diamond-set fairy hovering nearby, is to participate in a kind of cultivated whimsy where jewellery, timekeeping and art dissolve into one another. For a maison so invested in the poetry of time, what could be more fitting than fruit that never spoils?
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