There is a school of watchmaking that concerns itself primarily with precision, legibility and the elegant management of mechanical complexity. Van Cleef & Arpels is aware of this school and has chosen, with characteristic grace, to attend another. Since 1929, when the maison fitted a pocket watch with a moonphase complication simply because the moon deserved the attention, the approach has been consistent: time is not merely measured here, it is interpreted. It is made to feel like something. In 2026, with a new astronomical complication four years in the making, a dual-timezone movement whose dial shifts colour with the light, and a pair of extraordinary watches that tell a legend of celestial love, Van Cleef & Arpels does what it has always done: make time feel worth keeping.

Midnight Jour Nuit Phase de Lune

There are watch brands that make complications, and then there is Van Cleef & Arpels, which spends four years developing a single piece because the sky deserved to be rendered properly. Sitting with Rainer Bernard, the maison’s watchmaking research and development director, I begin to understand that this is not hyperbole.

The Midnight Jour Nuit Phase de Lune arrives in a 42mm white gold case carrying two complications in layered conversation. A 24-hour Jour/Nuit disc animates the passage of sun and moon across a sky of black Murano aventurine glass, a material the Innovation Department developed over considerable time to achieve a specific quality: depth of colour and a bronze-toned shimmer that actually evokes a clear night rather than merely gesturing at one. Beneath it, a true astronomical moonphase tracks the lunar cycle to 29 hours, 16 minutes and 27 seconds, following the moon’s actual 29.5-day cycle rather than offering a poetic approximation of it. When the moon retreats below the guilloché mother-of-pearl horizon, a button on the case rim triggers a full 360-degree dial rotation over ten seconds, bringing it back into view against a field of acrylic-traced stars. The engineering challenge Bernard describes is precise: the discs continue rotating through the animation sequence, so accuracy had to be maintained in motion, not just at rest. The caseback, engraved with the moon’s topography and set with a miniature enamel Earth above the oscillating weight, is a detail most wearers will rarely see. Van Cleef & Arpels made it anyway.

Ludo Secret

In 1934, Van Cleef & Arpels introduced the Ludo bracelet, its articulated links recalling the structure of a couture belt, its very existence an argument that jewellery and horology need not occupy separate drawers. It was an early exercise in trompe-l’oeil, that distinctly French pleasure of making one thing appear to be another, and it became foundational to everything the maison would go on to do.

The Ludo Secret carries that lineage into 2026 with the same logic intact. The watch is there, but it does not announce itself. The time is concealed beneath a cover that reveals the dial only when you choose to look, which means the bracelet presents first as jewellery and second as a timepiece, in that order, by design. There is something very Van Cleef about employing craft not to impress, but to enchant. What will not remain a secret, however, is my desire to have my own Ludo timepiece.

Midnight Heure d’ici & Heure d’ailleurs

The most romantic complication in watchmaking has always been the dual timezone. Not because of the mechanics, though the mechanics here are considerable, but because of what it implies: that there is someone, somewhere else, whose time matters as much as your own.

Van Cleef & Arpels understands this. The Midnight Heure d’ici & Heure d’ailleurs, home time and time elsewhere, houses a fully redeveloped automatic movement with a 65-hour power reserve in a 38mm rose gold case, displaying jumping hours and retrograde minutes for two simultaneous time zones. Both hour displays and the retrograde minute hand synchronise in a single coordinated sweep, so when the hand returns from 60 to zero, the hours advance together. The mechanism alone would be enough. But then there is the dial.

The enamel workshop in Geneva spent months arriving at a colour that replicates the dichroism of precious stones, specifically rubies, which shift between warm and cool depending on the quality and angle of light falling on them. Applied over a mirror-polished gold ground, the resulting amber-brown enamel moves through the day with you. It looks different at breakfast than it does at dinner, and different in a candlelit room than in the afternoon sun. This is not an accident. It is centuries of enamel technique deployed in the service of something that feels quietly alive.

Perlée

Some details in fine jewellery achieve something rare: they become inseparable from the object they adorn, so that removing them would not simplify the design but dissolve it. The beaded border of the Perlée collection is one such detail. Precise, tactile, immediately recognisable, it has governed this line from the beginning, and it remains, in white gold, as precise and recognisable as it has always been in yellow.

The newest addition to the Perlée family arrives with the same logic intact. Watchmaking precision framed within jewellery logic, wristwear that does not ask you to choose between the two. For those who believe a watch should feel, when clasped, like something that will outlast them.

Lady Rencontre Céleste & Lady Retrouvailles Célestes

The legend of Vega and Altair is one of the oldest love stories in the world. Two stars, separated by the Milky Way, are permitted to meet just once a year on the seventh night of the seventh lunar month. The birds form a bridge. The lovers cross it. Then they part again. It has endured for centuries because the longing at its centre is entirely human, and because no one has ever improved on the image of two points of light, separated by the whole of the sky, waiting.

Van Cleef & Arpels presents the story as a complementary pair within the Extraordinary Dials collection, and the choice of medium is the point. Miniature painting and enamel, techniques that themselves trace back centuries, are deployed at a scale that requires a magnifying glass to fully appreciate. Lady Rencontre Céleste holds the wistful anticipation of the encounter. Lady Retrouvailles Célestes holds the rapture of reunion. Together they form a single narrative, each watch enriched by the existence of the other. This is the kind of commission the maison’s artisans were made for, and you can feel, looking at them, that they knew it.

Van Cleef & Arpels is available at its boutique on Queen Street, Auckland.