Van Cleef & Arpels looks to poetic inspirations at Watches and Wonders 2026, blurring the lines between watches and jewellery in a host of new releases. Watches, in aventurine glass and embossed enamel, in moonlight and retrograde minutes, bring a romantic spin to traditional time-telling.
Midnight Jour Nuit Phase de Lune
The moon has been a reference point for Van Cleef & Arpels since 1929, when the maison first fitted a pocket watch with a moonphase complication. Nearly a century on, the Midnight Jour Nuit Phase de Lune brings that fascination to a 42mm white gold case, where two complications operate in layered concert. There is an evocative 24-hour Jour/Nuit, with a disc animating the passage of sun and moon, and a second disc completing one rotation every 29 hours, 16 minutes and 27 seconds. For the non-astronomers out there, this tracks the moon’s actual 29.5-day cycle with the precision of a true astronomical complication.
The sky itself is rendered in black Murano aventurine glass, a departure from its usual navy blue lustre. It has been developed by Van Cleef & Arpels’ Innovation Department to achieve a depth of colour and a bronze-toned shimmer that captures the quality of a clear night. A guilloché golden sun and a white mother-of-pearl moon take turns emerging from, and retreating behind, a guilloché mother-of-pearl horizon, painted in a gradient from black to white. When the moon is hidden below that horizon, a button on the case rim triggers an on-demand animation: the dial rotates 360 degrees over approximately ten seconds, revealing the lunar phase in its current state against a field of acrylic-traced stars.
The movement took four years of development at Van Cleef & Arpels’ Watchmaking Workshops in Geneva, and required a particular engineering solution, as Rainer Bernard, watchmaking research and development director, explains: ‘The key challenge lay in developing the on-demand animation. To avoid any inaccuracy in the moon phase, we had to take account of the changes that must occur during the course of the animation, since the discs are performing an additional full rotation.’ The caseback continues the narrative: an engraving evokes the moon’s topography in white gold, while the sapphire crystal over the oscillating weight features a miniature enamel rendering of the Earth, surrounded by miniature painted planets on a guilloché ground.
Midnight Heure d’ici & Heure d’ailleurs
Where the Jour Nuit Phase de Lune looks upward, the Midnight Heure d’ici & Heure d’ailleurs turns its attention to the horizontal plane of the globe. The 38mm rose gold Midnight case houses a fully redeveloped automatic movement with a 65-hour power reserve, displaying jumping hours alongside retrograde minutes for two simultaneous time zones. The Heure d’ici appears in the upper window; the Heure d’ailleurs in the lower. Two sector gears synchronise both discs and the retrograde minute hand, so that at the moment the hand sweeps back from 60 to zero, both hour displays jump forward together in deceptive simplicity.
The dial was created by Van Cleef & Arpels’ enamel workshop in Geneva, after artisans spent months arriving at a colour that captures a particular optical phenomenon: the dichroism of precious stones such as rubies, which appear warm or cool depending on the light that falls on them. The result is an amber-brown enamel whose nuances shift between warm and cold accents across the day, applied over a mirror-polished gold ground that amplifies reflections within the material. Stunning, evocative and setting a high bar for VC&A watchmaking in 2026 and beyond.