THE JOURNAL
Not long ago, Hermès Timepieces released a series of images to advertise its watches. They were not like other watch adverts. In one, a man floated past some modernist architecture, reading a book. In another, someone emerged from the shadows in a shirt and tie, riding a skateboard. “Time, a Hermès object”, they announced.
“Rather than dividing and seeking to control time, the maison explores another sort of time,” Mr Philippe Delhotal, creative director of La Montre Hermès, the company’s watchmaking division, told journalists. “One that stirs emotions, opens up interludes for recreation. Watches freed from the bonds of conventions.”
In other words, watches with a sense of playfulness and adventure – something that also defines Hermès more broadly as a brand. The fashion house that places uniqueness over trends, the handmade over the mass-produced and is one of France’s oldest family-owned and family-run luxury companies. (Hermès, famously, has strong equestrian links and started life in 1837 as a maker of high-end saddles and harnesses in Paris.)
Playfulness is rather underrepresented in the world of haute horlogerie. But it is all over Hermès’ unashamedly chic watches.
The Hermès Carré H, a circle inside a square, its dial referencing a compass and a pendulum. The Hermès Arceau Le temps suspendu, with its push-button mechanism snapping the hour and minute hands into a sharp V at 12 o’clock, giving the impression that time is standing still. And the Hermès H08, a watch as sporty as it is elegant, with its use of high-tech materials and custom-made fonts.
These are serious pieces, too, winning multiple awards at the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève, the “Oscars of the watch world”, as well as other highly regarded accolades.
Most recently, Hermès has reinvented the travel watch with its technically dazzling Hermès Arceau Le temps voyageur. Available in a 41mm platinum and black DLC-treated titanium case or a smaller 38mm steel case with a blue dial, the Arceau Le temps voyageur is a brand new technical and aesthetic take on a watch style known as a world timer.
A world timer is a type of watch complication that allows a wristwatch to display multiple time zones simultaneously. While a dual time zone watch ora GMT watch allows travellers to track two time zones at once (usually “local” time and “home” time), a world timer ups the ante – showing all 24 of the world’s major time zones simultaneously.
The Arceau Le temps voyageur, then, is a world timer reimagined to address how Hermès thinks about travel and time. The watch shows time in motion, with a subdial magically gliding over a fantasy map, its oceans laser-engraved and then lacquered. It is both a technical masterclass in watchmaking, and a mesmerising piece of mechanical art for the wrist.
The original Hermès Arceau watch was designed by Mr Henri d’Origny in 1978 and introduced several signature visual elements – a round case, a pair of asymmetrical lugs (the top ones are longer) inspired by stirrups and sloping numerals, apparently to evoke the galloping motion of a horse.
Hermès has used that design as a base for its reinterpretation of the world timer. To do so it developed its own “travelling time” mechanism, a disc-type display for the 24 zones. The disc appears over the map, itself designed by Hermès’ celebrated graphic designer Mr Jérôme Colliard. Originally created for a show-jumping competition in Paris and later used on one of the brand’s iconic silk scarves, Planisphère d’un monde equestre, features landmasses named for equestrian terms – “Dressage”, “Ethologie Equine”, and so on.
The home time is shown in an aperture at 12 o’clock, while local time is read using the disc subdial. To set the watch, the wearer uses the pusher on the left side to align the subdial with a corresponding city on the city-ring that corresponds with their local time. Pull the crown up and synchronise the time in the arched aperture, and you’re all set to travel. This is where the Hermès Arceau Le temps voyageur becomes truly mesmerising – the subdial glides above the “equestrian planet”, and journeys across the main dial. Time literally travels with you.
Hermès has been making its own unique watches in this manner for little more than 40 years. In watch terms, where some companies date back almost three centuries, it is no time at all. But that only makes the impact it has had in the business the more impressive.
In 2022, watches became the fastest growing category for the brand, they have been both a huge critical and commercial hit. And it has achieved this in the only way it knows how – that is, the Hermès way.
When Hermès Horloger started up, it did not poach its staff from a more established watch company or recruit a crack squad of industry veterans. It requisitioned its own celebrated designer of silk ties, Henri d’Origny, to design watches, and assigned other people close to Hermès, who understood its philosophy, to ensure that the spirit and codes of the maison remained intact. So far, this plan seems to be working out rather well.
“We are here at the level of the best players in terms of technique and quality,” Mr Laurent Dordet, CEO of Hermès Horloger, and previously head of the leather goods and “saddle-stitched” luggage division, said recently. “But also to propose something radically different in terms of philosophy and creativity.”