Pieces from the Maison’s heritage and contemporary creations were revealed in an immersive environment that recreates the charm of Paris. Alongside the Jewelry and High Jewelry collections, Van Cleef & Arpels’ watches took center stage in four of it’s cherished universes: Love Stories - notably with the Pont des Amoureux collection - Poetic Astronomy, Ballerinas and Fairies, and Enchanting Nature. Each of the creations featured at Dubai Watch Week expressed the grace, the enchantment and the singular poetry of time that is so unique to the Maison. 

Born out of the marriage of Alfred Van Cleef and Estelle Arpels, the Maison has been celebrating love stories since its earliest creations. Like a sign of destiny, the first piece listed in the sales book in 1906 was a heart set with diamonds. Today, this founding theme continues to suffuse the Maison’s creations with poetry and enchantment.

The watches of the Pont des Amoureux collection celebrate love and the intensity of longed-for reunions. United by tender feelings, a young woman and a young man decide to meet on a Paris bridge. Indicating the hours and minutes respectively thanks to a retrograde movement, they move towards each other to exchange a kiss at midday and midnight. To relive the poetry of that moment at any time, an animation-on-demand module enables the romantic scene to be replayed at will.

In 2018, Van Cleef & Arpels has revisited its Midnight Planétarium watch to provide a feminine interpretation. Featuring both refined aesthetics and an automatic movement developed exclusively for the Maison, the Lady Arpels Planétarium watch depicts the Sun and its closest planets: Mercury, Venus and Earth – accompanied by its satellite, the Moon. Each heavenly body moves at its actual speed, orbiting the dial in 88 days for Mercury, 224 days for Venus and 365 days for Earth. In a major innovation, the Moon also rotates around the Earth on this piece, completing its orbit in 29.5 days and bringing the dial to life with its daily dance. 

Symbols of joy and hope, fairies and ballerinas form an emblematic Van Cleef & Arpels tradition, which began in the early 1940s. Born out of Louis Arpels’ passion for the world of dance, the first dancer clips soon won over collectors with their elegant poses and beautiful costumes. Created during the same period, the fairy clips are recognizable for their ethereal winged silhouettes, sometimes complemented by a magic wand. 

Today, these feminine figures also adorn the Maison’s watches: like muses, they accompany the passage of time on creations that combine craft skills and watchmaking savoir-faire.

To pay tribute to the nature that has fascinated it ever since 1906, the Maison has drawn inspiration from the floral clock concept (Horologium Florae), developed by Carl Von Linné, in his 1751 book Philosophia Botanica. In it, the Swedish botanist evokes a hypothetical garden plan made up of a broad variety of plants, whose flowers open and close at specific moments of the day to show the time. Van Cleef & Arpels has taken up this principle to bring two brand-new creations into being: the Lady Arpels Heures Florales and Lady Arpels Heures Florales Cerisier watches. Their three-dimensional dial offers a poetic rendition of the passage of time, thanks to the opening and closing of 12 corollas. Telling the time becomes a spectacle, as the flowers blossom and close, renewing the dial’s scenery every 60 minutes.