We often talk about the storied legacy of brands; of the provenance, history, and reputation. In simplest terms, that means they’ve got skin in the game – and that means repetition. Designs we’ve seen before; accuracy slower than its contemporaries. True envelope-pushing, on the other hand, is almost impossible to manufacture.
So I love it when watch brands do something entirely head-spinningly disarming and provocative that all we can do is stop and stare.
Instead of walking down the well-trodden path that nearly three hundred years of history affords you, attempt something that we’ve simply never seen before. In the case of Vacheron Constantin’s latest Métiers d'Art Tribute to the Animal Kingdom, neither had the artists involved.
And it may well be the Maison’s most impressive creative experiment yet.
RELATED: Vacheron Constantin Just Solved The Only Real Problem With Perpetual Calendars
Vacheron Constantin invited six artisans, largely plucked from outside horology, to produce six concept watches within its revered One of Not Many Crafts Programme.
Through its revered ‘One of Not Many Crafts Programme’, Vacheron Constantin invited six artisans, most of them working well outside the traditional world of horology, to produce six concept watches inspired by its enduring animal motifs. For every artist, that meant starting again. No pressure, then.
Julien Vermeulen was forced to hold his breath at the most crucial moments when producing the Feathersnake concept – an imaginary snake coiling across the dial and built from 200 individually cut pieces sourced from seven rare Lophophore feathers – so he wouldn’t displace the lophophore natural feathers that measured just a few tenths of a millimetre. The result is a masterpiece of micro-plumasserie.
Whilst Simone Crestani, a master glass sculptor, started working with glass from an incredibly young age, the Italian admitted he had never worked with anything this small through his 25-year career.
To produce the Glassoctopus, he wanted to create the illusion of the animal drifting through its nocturnal world, coating the dial with a dark blue and finishing with a hand-guilloché gold base.
“[I had] to completely rethink my technique and adapt all my tools to ensure that every detail remained readable and alive within the dial's dimensions, while still giving the octopus a sculptural presence and a sense of movement, as if floating underwater,” Crestani said.
Anya Midori faced a similar problem, only instead of blowing a miniature Oraygami figure, she had to invent entirely new origami folding sequences from scratch, committing hours and hours to studying the unique movements of rays to understand how they move underwater before her fingers touched paper.
Using nothing but her fingers, fingernails, and a toothpick as her preferred tools, Midori folded her miniature rays across the dial with such precision as if to invoke the moving depths.
Each ray, measuring from 5- 10 mm, was specially dyed too to contrast against the deep blue below – around six hours for each ray from start to finish; the process took two years to complete.
So too, Laura Baverstock, a goldwork embroiderer who had trained at the Royal School of Needlework, was pushed to work with a material that was almost unheard of, 9-karat gold thread, a material more rigid than the trace amounts typically used in her profession.
At the scale required – half the scale of the smallest piece she had ever attempted – bespoke needles measuring just 0.25 millimetres were designed to twist and form this tricky material into the desired shape.
“‘Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye’,” Laura Baverstock said. “For me, this project perfectly embodies the balance between artistic innovation and the technical discipline of embroidery that defines my creative process.”
Marianne Guély, a French designer celebrated for her monumental paper installations that have filled shop windows as tall as eight metres high, had to relearn her own material at a scale of just 3mm, developing heated brass matrices capable of embossing cotton paper without tearing it.
Experimentation took months to develop bespoke embossing tools that would give the Papercroc the texture and profile required under a case so small, as if carved from ice with intense precision so that it would stand just 3mm tall.
And Anna Le Corno, better known for sculpting furniture from wood, found herself working beneath binocular magnification with surgical scalpels and custom carbide bits. She ultimately invented a “feather-by-feather” marquetry technique simply to give the falcon's wing across Woodenwings a sense of realism and movement.
Six artisans, all with their own unique craft that had never come anywhere near a mainspring, had one common thread running through every one: at some point, every one of them doubted they’d actually pull it off.
Perfect, then, for the concept board at Vacheron Constantin’s Swiss HQ, where I can only assume “pourquoi pas?” is scribbled across every slide.