When Hermès suspended time

When Hermès suspended time

In March 2011, a few weeks before the opening of the Basel World Watch Show, we discovered a watch with some very strange functions: the hours it indicates are willing to be suspended, giving the illusion that you have become the master of time. It’s a time that’s tailor-made for you, and that passes if you want it to, when you want it to. Archive from 17 April 2011. Isabelle Cerboneschi

The Japanese have a name for the gentle melancholy associated with the ephemeral, that comes over us when we realise that time is inexorable: ‘Mono no aware’. But you have to have the time to watch it go by…

Since we’ve accepted the yoke of immediacy, via our smartphones and computers, we find ourselves dreaming of slowing down, of suspending the passage of time, as if we were reclaiming a bastion of freedom. Some houses have sensed that an era ripe with lost illusions could generate irrational needs of this kind. Since time had become a rare and therefore coveted commodity, why not invent a watch that would embody a sense of its relativity? An object that would have the courtesy to make its owner believe that the hours could be slowed down, sped up, or even set aside, on simple request.

The first to think of this was Hermès. In 2008, the House dared to present an unusual watch called the Grandes Heures, in which some hours passed more slowly than others. To convey this impression, the hour-markers were distributed asymmetrically across the dial, with a greater gap between one hour and the next. At the heart of this watch was an ETA movement with an additional module developed by the former BNB Concept SA, which has since become a subsidiary of Hublot, enabling the hour hand to advance at a variable speed. The owner of the object could thus choose, according to his lifestyle, which moments he dreamed of making last and which he wished to dispatch.

In 2011, Hermès is relaunching a new, revised Grandes Heures model, with a case 1.5 mm thinner and a module entirely redesigned by Dubois Dépraz SA. As Luc Perramond, Managing Director of La Montre Hermès, likes to describe it, this watch marks ‘the time of the imagination’. ‘Watchmaking technology must convey the poetic dimension of the House. If we choose to make complications, they must be unconventional: nobody expects us to be in the perpetual calendar business,’ he stresses.

Speaking of unconventional complications, why not try to stop time? For Hermès, watchmaker-designer Jean-Marc Wiederrecht preferred to suspend time rather than stop it. The idea came to him ‘following a beautiful encounter that we didn’t want to end’, he says. Because there are a few rare moments in life when the quality of the time that passes is more important than the quantity. The watchmaker-designer, who knows better than anyone the material from which dreams are made, has succeeded in materialising this desire, not to freeze time, but to extract himself from it.

‘I’ve been working on this project commissioned by Hermès for three and a half years now,’ confides Jean-Marc Wiederrecht. How do you manage to suspend time? I first thought of using a split-seconds hand,’ he says. With a pusher, you would have stopped the hands, then by pressing the pusher again, you would have recovered the standard time, a bit like a stopwatch. But that wasn’t a satisfactory solution, because when you decide to give someone time, you shouldn’t be able to count it down.’ This elegant thought led him to follow another path.

Le Temps Suspendu, the name of the model he helped to design, is inscribed on the day dial, located on a lower plane between 3 and 6 o’clock. Nothing could be more normal than the face of this watch, whose complication is invisible to the eye. A small push-button at 9 o’clock is barely noticeable and intriguing. Press it and the hands seem to race to position themselves on an illegible time: the hour hand is positioned a little before the 12, and the minute hand just a little after. An hour that does not exist. The owner of the watch can then decide to offer his time to whomever he wishes, without being tempted to interrupt this precious moment because of two despotic hands.

They appear so harmless stopped in what looks like a time wasteland… ‘There aren’t many ways of disconnecting the movement from the time display,’ points out Jean-Marc Wiederrecht. His choice? ‘A triple retrograde. The hour and minute hands make a 360-degree turn and go backwards, and the day hand disappears under the dial when time seems to stop moving. Press the push-button and the exact time and date are displayed again. How much time has passed? If anyone cares, this watch is not for them.