Inside the unique world of watchmaking at Van Cleef & Arpels

This is your chance to see rare watches that have little to do with telling time.

Lady Arpels Brise d’Été watch enamel miniature painting.

Rainer Bernard, head of research and development for watchmaking at Van Cleef & Arpels, likes to think of the French jeweller’s approach to timekeeping as something of a dance. Perhaps an illusion.

“I’m an opera fan, so when I go see an opera play, I want to see the singer, the series. I don’t want to see cables, pipes, ventilators, lamps. This is certainly necessary to make it, but I don’t want to see it. It’s behind the scenes. We make jewellery that tells time and I don’t want to see it … a screw does not fit into that,” he says.

Van Cleef & Arpels' Rainer Bernard sees poetry in watchmaking.

What he means is that all of the impressive technicalities and haute horology behind the Van Cleef & Arpels timepieces – which can make butterflies flit across a dial or lovers kiss on a bridge – are all in service to the story. There’s not a whirling tourbillon, sapphire case back, or yes, screw, to be found. Instead, says Bernard, timekeeping at Van Cleef & Arpels is about “poetry”.

The maison’s history in creating imaginative timepieces will be explored in a new pop-up exhibition, Van Cleef & Arpels, A Journey Through the Poetry of Time, showcasing some 40 rare watches and opening in Melbourne’s Chadstone on Wednesday. It will be the first time Van Cleef & Arpels has hosted such an exhibition open to the public in Australia, and follows similar ones held around the world.

For Pascal Narbeburu, timepieces director at Van Cleef & Arpels, the exhibition spotlights the “love stories, nature, chance, couture (and) poetic astronomy” that serve as constant sources of inspiration, as well as the craftsmanship behind the timepieces.

The Van Cleef & Arpels Pont Des Amoureux watch.

Narbeburu says a particular favourite of the exhibition – including the Australian debut of watches shown at the watch industry’s annual major fair, Watches & Wonders – is the Lady Arpels Heures Florales watch. “It has a surprising way to indicate the time and the inspiration behind it is unique. The animation gives you the feeling that you wear a real garden at your wrist,” he says. Last month Nicholas Bos was promoted from chief executive of Van Cleef & Arpels to chief executive of Richemont, the conglomerate that includes other jewellers and watch brands including Cartier, Jaeger-LeCoultre and more. He takes on the job at a time of unease for the luxury industry though a reasonably buoyant one for Richemont, especially for its jewellery brands. The group’s sales rose 3 per cent at actual exchange rates to an all-time high of €20.6bn ($33.3bn) for the financial year ending in March.

Lady Arpels Heures Florales Cerisier watch positioning a flower petal on the dial.

For Bos, constantly delighting increasingly discerning clients is part of Van Cleef & Arpels’s success.

“Clients like to be surprised. A lot of them that we see on a more regular basis, we know they appreciate the stories, they appreciate the way we do things,” he told The Australian during the Watches & Wonders fair earlier this year.

Highlighting the different crafts behind the timepieces, he says, was essential in this year’s presentations. It is something the pop-up will emphasise too with a specialist enameller flown in from Paris to demonstrate her practice at the nearby Van Cleef & Arpels boutique in ­Chadstone.

The Van Cleef & Arpels Pont Des Amoureux watch.

Richemont chief executive Nicolas Bos.

“As we develop different stories, different projects, we’ve explored quite a wide spectrum of craftsmanship, a lot of different types of enamel and a lot of other techniques … they are very often the starting point of how we will interpret the story … some of them are very ancient, some of them (had) almost disappeared that we tried to revive, and some new ones,” he says.

The preservation of practically extinct techniques is important to Bos and is something that will be on display in the exhibition in one of the key pieces – the Pont des Amoureux (lover’s bridge) time piece.

“There’s a technique in enamelling that we love that we revived a few years ago which is based on gradation of black and white and was actually very, very important in the 16th century,” says Bos.

As Bos points out, techniques have updated for modern times also, including lead-free enamel.

“So that’s quite exciting. You very rarely invent something. Very often it’s about reviving from the past or reinterpreting and sometimes you have technical needs like in enamel for very valid reasons,” he says.

“It’s been a very long journey and … after years we found ways to develop an enamel without lead, but that still enabled (us) to create some very, very vivid colours.”

The Van Cleef & Arpels Journey Through the Poetry of Time pop-up is open to the public from July 17 to July 30 at Chadstone Shopping Centre.