BY HARLAN CHAPMAN-GREEN
One of my favourite visits at Watches & Wonders Geneva is Van Cleef & Arpels, not only because their booth looks like a colourful fever dream, but because they’re always doing something beautiful. That said, most of the watches they produce are for women and tie into their renowned jewellery collection in some way. That’s fine, of course, and if I had the money, I would probably follow Timothée Chalamet’s lead and wear whatever jewellery I damn well pleased, but it’s nice to have something a little more ‘blokey’ in the collection even with that precious Van Cleef & Arpels touch. For 2026, they’ve delivered.
Midnight Heure d’ici & Heure d’ailleurs
Officially not a men’s watch as Van Cleef & Arpels doesn’t really do male/female pieces, the new Midnight Heure d’ici & Heure d’ailleurs watch would add a graceful touch to nearly every wrist. At 38mm across and in 18k rose gold, its colours are tasteful and restrained. The red hue of the enamel over the guilloché dial is especially beautiful and varies with the angle and type of light.
The dial follows the unique layout of Van Cleef & Arpels’ Midnight Heure watches, with a retrograde hand showing the minutes in between two hour display windows. Midnight Heure d’ici & Heure d’ailleurs translates to ‘midnight hours here and hours elsewhere’, and indicates that this watch shows two different time zones simultaneously on its dial, very cool stuff.
This is thanks to a self-winding mechanical movement which, if it is the same calibre as in other Heure d’ici & Heure d’ailleurs watches, was developed with Jean-Marc Wiederrecht and is a unique movement rather than an ebauche. The details on movements provided by Van Cleef & Arpels are vague, but we know it has a 65-hour power reserve. For now, we don’t know the price, but we know these are due to go on sale in October 2026.
Midnight Jour Nuit Phase de Lune
It wouldn’t be a visit to Van Cleef & Arpels if we didn’t get to see some form of exceptional artistry combined with mechanical ingenuity. The Midnight Jour Nuit Phase de Lune watch builds on the maison’s Jour Nuit collection and features a day/night display with the moonphase integrated into it. A hand-cut guilloché disk depicts the sun, with golden rays extending outward onto the starry aventurine glass plate that represents the sky. When night comes around, the sun sets, and the moon rises. A disk below the day/night indicator rotates at the rate of the moon’s rotation around the Earth and uses aventurine to represent a new moon, and mother-of-pearl to indicate when the moon is visible in the sky.
Clever mechanical engineering ensures the disks are always correctly aligned when set, so as long as the watch is running, the day/night and moonphase displays will be in perfect harmony. Moreover, a pusher on the side of the case showcases this by making the disks rotate a full rotation in a pleasing, animated way on demand. It got everyone’s attention at the booth. A self-winding calibre makes this possible, and it features a rotor adorned with a depiction of the galaxy as seen from space.
At 42mm in 18k white gold, the watch is quite big, but it needs to be to hold all the engineering that makes the display work. It’s an elegant piece, though, and Van Cleef & Arpels’ abilities with enamelling, engraving, and finishing in general are second to none. The price for all this second-to-none-ness is $153,000.
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