It's Hermès Time

After decades spent building its reputation as a watchmaker, the luxury fashion and leather-goods powerhouse is taking its place among the Swiss

- Chris Rovzar

It was a silly visual trick that turned Hermès International into a serious competitor in the watchmaking world. In 2011 the brand released Time Suspended, a mechanical watch featuring a fun little complication: Push a button, and the hour and minute hands would stop, effectively freezing a moment in time. A hand that kept track of the date slipped out of sight completely. Hidden beneath the face of the watch, the timekeeping mechanism continued to work, but you could theoretically leave the hands locked in place as long as you’d like—a minute, an hour, a week—until you pushed the button again, returning them to the correct time, the watch as accurate as ever.

“We surprised everybody with that complication,” says Guillaume de Seynes, executive vice president of Hermès and a sixth-generation member of the luxury house’s ruling family. De Seynes says this proved to people what the watchmaking team at Hermès could do.

When his uncle, then-Chairman Jean-Louis Dumas, assigned him to the timepieces division in 1999, the brand had been doing a decent business, but it had been selling mostly fashion watches— beautiful trifles with clean lines that were worn for decoration and powered by batteries rather than clever mechanics. There was the Heure H collection, which boasted bold H-shaped cases, and the Cape Cod line, a preppy staple designed to look like a nautical chain.