Slamchica
Van Cleef & Arpels adds a new chapter to the Poetry of Time, and recreates the ethereal lightness of nature with its new Lady Arpels Ronde des Papillons watch, presented at this year’s SIHH. This new Poetic Complications watch brings together three colored butterflies in a playful aerial to-and-fro. Their circling dance between the clouds sets the tempo for the minutes, while the hours take flight in the wake of a swallow, symbol of joyful portent. With this winged ballet, Van Cleef & Arpels portrays all the vitality of nature and expresses the passage of time with a delicate poetry unique to the Maison.
Beneath the apparent delicacy of the dial, the retrograde hour, variable speed minutes and animation on demand movement developed exclusively for the Lady Arpels Ronde des Papillons watch is highly sophisticated. Virtuoso watchmaking expertise is applied to a ballet of butterflies moving at different speeds. In a one-hour cycle, they accelerate and then slow down again, thanks to an elliptical wheel inside the mechanism.
The gentle luminosity of the sky is suggested by a background of mother of‑pearl, hand-painted in bluish shades. Floating at different heights, mother‑of‑pearl clouds compose a subtle palette of greys. The graceful creatures stand out against it, their colors produced by miniature painting. While the swallow in engraved white gold is soberly clad in black, white and blue, the butterflies display joyful gradations of color: from white to pink, yellow to orange and red to yellow.
