Hermès Cut: a gesture and a name
It has both soft and taut lines, and is round with beveled sides. The Hermès Cut watch, designed for women, was born of a double shape: a circle and a round cut, hence its name. This pure object of design that tells the time has been pre-selected for the Grand Prix de l’Horlogerie de Genève in the ladies’ watch category. Isabelle Cerboneschi
There are words whose consonance reveals their meaning. Verbs whose gesture can be guessed just by listening to them. Cut, ˈkʌt in phonetics. Three letters, including two short, unvoiced sounds, with no vibration produced by the vocal cords. K, T, two sharp letters. You know what to expect. No frills. A gesture. That’s the Hermès Cut watch. A ring and a cut circle that gave it its name. But has the round been cut or the angles softened? No matter. The design of this watch is pure, conceived to say what’s essential: the hour, the minutes, the seconds, which count when they’re said beautifully.
Presented a few weeks before Watches & Wonders, the Hermès Cut watch completes the collection in the House’s feminine segment. “We didn’t have any models like this before: it’s our first women’s automatic watch in a sporty-chic environment. A piece to be worn every day and in every situation”, explains Philippe Delhotal, Creative Director of Hermès Horloger.
“We didn’t want to create a watch with a classic shape and lugs, which is why we came up with this atypical shape: a cut-off round and a perfect circle to underline the whole,” continues the Creative Director. The circle adds rigor, while the truncated circle softens the whole with its fantasy. It’s an unlikely shape. When you look at the Hermès Cut from a distance, you can make out a circle. And the closer you get to it, the more it reveals itself, revealing that it’s not what you think, since it’s cut and has four sides. It’s a kind of trompe-l’œil.
To create this model, aimed primarily at a female clientele, the Hermès Horloger teams worked on the shape through a creative act. For the members of the Bauhaus school, the artist is an exalted craftsman, and this exaltation can be felt in the gesture of deliberately truncating parts of the watch. The gestures are sure, but gentle. This shape is of obvious simplicity,” continues Philippe Delhotal. There are no added parts. Its shape is self-sufficient.
To keep the visual aspect as clean as possible and not alter the purity of the lateral bevels, the crown has been shifted to 1 o’clock instead of its usual position at 3 o’clock. And since this is a sporty model, it won’t hurt the hand during certain movements. “This crown provides real ergonomic comfort, while at the same time disappearing a little into the shape,” emphasizes Philippe Delhotal.
A crown at 1 o’clock? And why not? As no date appears on the dial, there was no need to modify the design of the movement: “All we had to do was turn it a little,” he continues. We didn’t want dates on this watch. I find that they don’t always sit very well on a dial, and tend to cut into the symmetry of the round hours.”
It’s not easy to name an object, as many names have already been registered, even the most unlikely. “Hermes Cut was one of the first we came up with. It wasn’t even a name, but a gesture: to cut. It came naturally in the course of the exercise, in this action of coming to act in the material. Its shape, slightly almond-shaped, is the result of the machining and polishing through which this watch has passed.”
Its size is not insignificant: 36 mm. “If the Hermès H08 watch belongs to the masculine universe, Hermès Cut is the feminine answer to this model, which is why we insisted that it be designed in a 36mm diameter,” emphasizes Philippe Delhotal. A proposal for women that men are already borrowing. In watchmaking, gender is much more fluid than we imagine. “When we presented this watch in Japan, I was surrounded by male Japanese journalists and one of them said to us: ‘I’d wear it right away because it’s a size that suits me very well. It’s the first Hermès watch that men will borrow from their wives, whereas it’s usually the other way round. In fact, since we launched it, I’ve seen several men wearing it, and if I had a slimmer wrist, I’d do the same. But that wasn’t the primary aim. We wanted to meet a demand for a women’s collection. However, in reality, this size can also suit men, since today’s watchmaking world tends to return to much smaller proportions”.
When you take the Hermès Cut watch in your hands, you feel as if you’re holding a small piece of marble that has been worn away by water and the elements, and then shaped by the hand of the craftsman. The work of nature and the work of man. The box is soft in some places, with more accentuated angles in others, polished and satin-finished at the same time, allowing it to play with shadows. A simple shape can be very complex to create,” says Philippe Delhotal. We played with materials, mixing gold and steel, and with finishes that oscillate between polished and satin-finished. We chose to mix the two to bring different lights to this model. When you look at a watch that’s entirely polished or satin-finished, you don’t read it the same way. The polished aspect tends to erase shapes, while the matte will restore them. A matte object can be read much better than a shiny one. Shine reflects and reflects light, it’s deceptive, which is not the case with matte. This watch has both a softness and a sharpness. It’s a beautiful paradox.
