BEAUTY IN MOTION

VAN CLEEF & ARPELS' ENDURING AFFINITY WITH THE WORLD OF THE CHOREOGRAPHIC ARTS IS EPITOMISED BY ITS JEWELLERY AND WATCHES, AND PARTNERSHIPS WITH DANCE COMPANIES AND INSTITUTIONS THE WORLD OVER

- ZARA ZHUANG

When Van Cleef & Arpels made its return to the Watches & Wonders fair earlier this year, it presented magnificent works that evoke the poetry of time, a magical expression of time and its indication and passage, realised through the Maison's watchmaking expertise and jewellery savoirfaire. While the Poetic Astronomy automaton and the Lady Arpels Heures Florales Cerisier timepiece articulated the mystique surrounding time and the natural world, the Lady Arpels Ballerine Enchantée watch intimated the connection between time and dance. Reimagined from a reference introduced in 2013 which took inspiration from a quote by Anna Pavlova: "I dreamed that I was a ballerina, and that I spent my life dancing as light as a butterfly..."- the Lady Arpels Ballerine Enchantée now exhibits a more dynamic posture in the figure of the dancer, and new colours and materials on her tutu created with champlevé and pliqueà-jour enamel, as well as a self-winding double retrograde movement and time-on-demand module an extraordinary ode to the ballerina, a prominent emblem of the Maison.