At Cartier, the Cartier d’art explores all possible forms of art to create particularly express theme-based scenes. At the heart of a sculptural watch, five miniature panthers emerge from the savannah to admire a mechanical flying tourbillon movement. Each figurine adopts its own stance within an impressively realistic choreography. The decorative elements are sculpted from white gold under a microscope before being fitted on an onyx plate – a meticulous jewellery-making procedure that creates a truly stunning effect.
The Mademoiselle Privé from Chanel highlights the decorative features favoured by the founder of the Parisian house. Her favourite flower is given a delightful pictorial expression on the dial of the watch that has just won the Artistic Crafts Watch Prize in the Geneva Watchmaking Grand Prix. The camellia is crafted from silk threads of various colours by the Parisian embroidery specialists Lesage. This is the first time that its entirely hand-crafted “needle painting” technique has been applied to watchmaking, in an association that is entirely natural for a brand such as Chanel.
The musical watch deserves its name in more than auditory terms, since its nature is also visible at first glance. The mechanism, featuring 10 scaled-down bridges that hit the pins on a revolving disc, is unequivocally reminiscent of that of a classic music box. Stemming from a collaborative endeavour between watchmaker Ulysse Nardin and the artist Dieter Meier, mainly known as the lead singer of the Yellow band, this watch brimming with surprises plays the famous “Strangers in the Night” tune every hour or on demand. Technically sophisticated yet easy to use, it represents a first that the brand intends to interpret in various limited series.
Mr Harry Winston expressed his ultimate dream in a poetic manner : “If I could, I would place the diamonds directly on a woman’s skin”. Today, the in-house designers display boundless creativity in giving meaning to this now legendary statement. Witness the stunningly light and airy Haute Joaillerie models based on minimalist structures, such as the “Mrs. Winston High Jewelry Timepiece”. On the tapering marquise-shaped case and dial, the baguette-cut or brilliant-cut diamonds adopt varying dimensions so as to entirely cover the surface. On the bracelet rimmed along the outer edges with baguette-cut diamonds, a mixture of pear-cut, marquise and brilliant-cut diamonds are held by claws mounted on slender platinum bars. With the model on the wrist, the stones appear to be floating above the wrist in a delightfully romantic manner.
The Masterpiece Seconde Mystérieuse by Maurice Lacroix features an unusual dancer : the seconds hand performs on its dance floor like none other has ever done so before. While it rests on a transparent mobile disc like other mysterious hands, it does not spin around its centre and thus does not follow a classic circular path, but is instead off-centred and spins on its own axis while also moving in step with the underlying disc. It thereby alternately lines up vertically and horizontally every 15 seconds, moving through obliques to switch from one quarter to another. This unprecedented choreography works its magic within a partially openworked and resolutely contemporary creation.
