Motion, Music And Magic

Van Cleef & Arpels is, and always has been, unapologetically romantic – an approach that seeps even into the oft-bravado world of high watchmaking. Charlene Co rediscovers the house’s enduring dance with complications and poetry through its new Lady Arpels Ballerines Musicales timepieces.

- Charlene Co

The drapes part and ballerinas enter to fluid arabesques, grand jetés and elegant pirouettes, dancing to the music of Gabriel Fauré, Igor Stravinsky and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky; then the drapes close. Such is the enchanting 20- to 25-second sequence you can play whenever and wherever you fancy, and it sits right on your wrist. Just like many of Van Cleef & Arpels’ timepieces, the Lady Arpels Ballerines Musicales is not meant merely to be worn, but rather to experience and inevitably connect with.

The Lady Arpels Ballerines Musicales is Van Cleef & Arpels’ newest addition to its suite of Poetic Complications, which is inspired by one of the Arpels’ other loves – ballet. Louis Arpels was often known to walk to the Opéra Garnier, a short distance from his Place Vendôme boutique, to see a ballet with his nephew Claude. Such was their love for the art form that in the early 1940s, by which time the family had moved to New York, Van Cleef & Arpels created its first ballerina clips, which today is one of the house’s most distinguishable designs.

HOMAGE TO BALLET

This affinity with ballet profoundly deepened as Claude met choreographer and co-founder of the New York City Ballet, George Balanchine, with whom he shared a passion not only for ballet, but also for gems. This led to Balanchine producing a ballet, Jewels, which debuted in New York in 1967. Each act of the non-narrative triptych linked a gemstone to a musical composer: Fauré for Emeralds, Stravinsky for Rubies and Tchaikovsky for Diamonds.