Hermès @ Arceau le temps suspendu… playing with time

For Hermès, time is a friend, an ally and sometimes a playing partner… It enchants the world, allows the imagination to roam freely and stimulates the imagination. To launch its new Arceau Le temps suspendu model, Hermès has chosen to embark visitors upon a journey beyond time. To fully experience this interlude from conventional time, visitors cover their wristwatch with a ribbon to help them forget all about it. They are then invited by surprising figures with animal’s heads to move through a rotating door one at a time and thus enter a room that was once lived in but where time appears to have stood still.

 Branches, moss and flowers have invaded the furniture and the luxurious vegetation now pervades this place that has become a stage for part-human, part-animal and part-plant protagonists. The journey includes the painstaking task of building card towers, light, unstable and ephemeral constructions. Guided from one room to another by the surrealist characters, they take the time to put a puzzle back together again and continue into a softly cushioned room floating above the clouds like a dream, beyond space and time.

“Time Suspended” passengers end their wanderings in a large room surrounded by the dancing numerals of the Arceau watch and discover a world in which suspended furniture rubs shoulders with large, light and airy mobiles presenting the Arceau Le temps suspendu watches. The escapade is over, time can resume its onward march…Arceau Le temps suspendu provides a chance to experience a break, an interlude over which time has no hold. Its 38 mm diameter case features a pushbutton that may be pressed to bring the hour and minute hands to a halt at about 12 o’clock. Time is thus erased from the watch dial and dissociated from standard time that meanwhile pursues its invisible march.

 Pressing the button once more sets time running again. The gaze is instinctively drawn to the lively hand perpetually whirling backwards on the small sub-dial with 24 graduations, as if playfully taunting the passing of time. Behind these pirouettes lies a clever mechanism orchestrating a unique horological complication exclusively developed for Hermès.

 Protected by two patents, one for its architecture and the other for the play-reducing gear teeth, the module is an addition to the Manufacture Calibre H1912. The running time and suspended time phases are coordinated by two synchronised column wheels: one driving the hours and the other the minutes. This 360° retrograde hour and minute mechanism makes time disappear without stopping the movement.

 Its uninterrupted running is displayed on the movement operating indicator, driven by a fourth wheel turning in the opposite direction. Arceau Le temps suspendu is of course a watch and it naturally tells the time. However, it is and does much more than that by offering a playful moment on the wrist.

The Arceau Le temps suspendu watch provides a chance to experience a break, an interlude over which time has no hold. Its 38 mm diameter case features a pushbutton that may be pressed to bring the hour and minute hands to a halt at about 12 o’clock. Time is thus erased from the watch dial and dissociated from standard time that meanwhile pursues its invisible march. Pressing the button once more sets time running again. The gaze is instinctively drawn to the lively hand perpetually whirling backwards on the small subdial with 24 graduations, as if playfully taunting the passing of time. The running time and suspended time phases are coordinated by two synchronised column wheels: one driving the hours and the other the minutes. This 360° retrograde hour and minute mechanism makes time disappear without stopping the movement. Its uninterrupted running is displayed on the movement operating indicator, driven by a fourth wheel turning in the opposite direction.