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It’s complicated – why do we value some mechanical functions more than others?

It’s complicated – why do we value some mechanical functions more than others?

Laura McCreddie-Doak

“We don’t have a book for our complications, we have to invent them ourselves,” says Rainer Bernard, head of research and development at Van Cleef & Arpels. He is talking about its Brise d’Été, a watch that took home the Ladies Complication prize at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève (GPHG) in 2024, and which is a mechanical masterpiece. The dial is a garden in summer, with beautiful blue flowers and dancing butterflies. When the pusher at eight o’clock is pressed, the garden springs to life – flowers sway in the breeze in a graceful, yet irregular motion, while the butterflies float around the outside, their forms stopping around the dial precisely 10 seconds after where it was when the animation was started.

van cleef arpels brise dete

To do this, Bernard and his team had to create the gearing from scratch. “We needed to invent the mechanics to create an irregular movement for the flowers,” he says. “Then we had to work out how to move the flowers because the heads are really too large for the stems.” Every one of Van Cleef & Arpels’ “poetic complications”, as they are known, starts life as an idea, which turns into a sketch. In this case, the designer had drawn beautiful, bountiful blooms balanced on slim stalks – proportions that wouldn’t occur naturally. Rather than send the designer away to draw something more practical, Bernard thought, “is this possible mechanically? The answer was ‘no’”, he explains. “So now we needed to invent a system to make this happen.”

That system was a way of cupping the flower underneath, making the automaton push it, so the flower is the thing that moves rather than the stem. This being Van Cleef & Arpels, the mechanics of how the movement is achieved has to be hidden to preserve the magic. “I love going to the opera, but I don’t want to see the cables,” quips Bernard. All this innovation – and that’s before you start talking about how the maison invented a method by which enamel can be turned into a material that can be used for three-dimensional sculpting – and this watch will be spoken about as having an “emotional complication”; the rather damning phrase used to describe complications that have no time-keeping use.

Which is ironic really because if we are going to be pedantic about this, most complications have no time-keeping use. The tourbillon was created to counteract the effects of gravity on the watch’s regulating organs that occurred because it was kept in a pocket; a minute repeater was created so we could know the time in the dark. If we’re going to be really perverse about this, everything a watch does – from knowing how much time has elapsed via a chronograph, to actually telling the time – can be done with greater accuracy with a mobile phone, essentially rendering it useless. The reason, one could argue (and this one is going to) that tourbillons and perpetual calendars are held up as examples of technical prowess, while getting two lovers to kiss on a bridge at midday and midnight is considered merely “emotional”, is because we see watchmaking complications, or functions, through a male gaze.

“There are some brands bringing some kind of mechanical innovation and complications for women watches but they always leave me with a funny taste,” Christopher Ward’s senior designer Adrian Buchmann says half proving the point. “There are some fantastic developments, from Van Cleef for example, but feels like it is still a design for a “Barbie Girl”, something without depth to it. But who said butterflies and flowers aer a woman thing, and gears are a man thing?”

Chanel J12 Atelier Couture Automate Calibre 6
Chanel J12 Atelier Couture Automate Calibre 6

The disconnect might be that you can’t see the gears that make the butterflies and flowers move, and therefore not so inclined to appreciate the mechanical feats that go into its creation. Van Cleef & Arpels goes so far to preserve the magic you can’t even see anything through the sapphire case back because the rotor is, deliberately, in the way. The same isn’t true for Chanel’s latest contribution to its in-house calibre collection, which can be admired in all its monochromatic glory.

Calibre 6 is the Maison’s first automaton. It has taken five years to develop and has 355 components, though most of the cams that drive the automaton remain hidden so as not to spoil the sparse aesthetic of the movement. It animates a joyful cartoon Mademoiselle, complete with scissors about to alter a garment on a mannequin. It may seem natural now for Chanel to combine haute couture with haute horlogerie – the collection, which also includes a breathtaking clock with mannequins twirling to My Woman by Al Bowlly, is called Couture O’Clock – however it took a long time for it to shake off that “fashion watch” stigma and be taken seriously.

Never mind that, before it established its own manufacture in La Chaux de Fonds, it collaborated with the likes of Audemars Piguet on its first tourbillon. There was also the J12 Rétrograde Mysterieuse, a personal collaboration between then-CEO Nicholas Beau and Giulio Papi (renowned super-complication maker and one half of Renaud et Papi, now owned by Audemars Piguet). For the likes of the Calibre 1 (Chanel’s first in-house movement), the brand tagged Roman Gauthier for help, cased in the gorgeous Monsieur de Chanel.

Lady Arpels Heures Florales

For years, Chanel was dismissed by the watcherati as a fashion and jewellery house that happened to make watches. It took a few calibres, one of which had galvanically grown wheels, for it to be taken seriously, in no small part because Chanel did things such as cover a tourbillon with a diamond-set camellia, so you watched the flower, rather than the cage, spinning, or used an automaton to animate a fashion designer. This is something which, some might argue, diminishes the technical wizardry at play. “I’ve never understood why so many women’s complications go heavy on the flowers and fairies,” says Dr Rebecca Struthers, co-founder of Struthers London, author, and first person to be awarded a doctorate in horology. “I mean, sure, they’re beautiful but it’s not something I’d ever wear regardless of how impressive they are. I guess they know their markets, but it’s also striking that one of the most complicated watches in the world was designed for a woman, and there isn’t a flower in sight. It’s just a shame Marie Antoinette didn’t live to see it!”

gucci g timeless planetarium

Marie Antoinette’s pocket watch aside, why don’t we talk about timepieces that have rotating stones as hour markers (Gucci’s G-Timeless Planetarium), or ones that tell the time using butterfly’s wings and a counter-clockwise rotating hour disc (Fabergé’s Compliquée Butterfly) in the same way we do minute repeaters or tourbillons? Arguably, these complications are more impressive because there is no blueprint for them. Just because, in Bernard’s words, the “how” of something working “disappears behind the jewellery”, should it not still be accorded the same respect as when a massive gyrotourbillon is placed front-and-centre?

Struthers explains, “it’s because women’s watches simply aren’t taken as seriously regardless of the level of complication”. And that is probably the depressing reality of it all. Every time you see a panel, listen to a watch podcast, or see a discussion on a YouTube channel, it’s generally a group of men talking. Men who, broadly speaking, aren’t going to give a second thought to the ingenuity it takes to tell the time through the seemingly random opening of flowers. In case you’re interested, it takes a wheel charging a spring in the barrel that feeds the power to the animation. This barrel uses a centrifugal regulator to control how fast or slow the flowers open and close, in a cycle that takes up to four seconds. And it’s based on Carl Von Linné’s Philosophia Botanica, in which the Swedish botanist wrote about a garden in which blooms opened and closed to tell the time. Surely that’s as impressive as a constant-force escapement.