Hermès takes liberties with time

As a general rule, the measuring of time is a serious business. We expect our watch to do its job with regularity and reliability; to look good but also to serve a useful purpose. Hermès speaks a different language. “Precision, quality, expertise… these are all words that could describe Hermès Time,” muses Laurent Dordet, CEO of La Montre Hermès, “and of course this is an important part of what we do in watchmaking, but we add qualities such as fantasy and playfulness. Our watches express the desire to be free, the little “step out of line” whereby we take what we do seriously without taking ourselves seriously.”

Hermès marks out its territory

For proof of this, one only need glance back to 2011 and Arceau Le Temps Suspendu, developed by Agenhor. Thanks to an ingenious triple retrograde mechanism, and a press on a pusher, the hour and minute hands come to a standstill on either side of noon to indicate an improbable time, while the date hand disappears beneath the dial. A few stolen moments in time’s relentless march until the second press on the pusher, when normal service is resumed. Three years later, this time in collaboration with Vaucher Manufacture, Hermès presented Dressage L’Heure Masquée. Now it’s the hour hand’s turn to disappear, hidden behind the minute hand which continues to sweep the dial. The hour hand appears, in its correct position, only after pressing a button in the crown. This also slides open an aperture at 6 o’clock to reveal a second time zone indication.

These two watches “marked out and formalised a territory” for Hermès, says Laurent Dordet. A territory with naturally extendable borders, and so the Parisian firm set to work, again with Jean-Marc Wiederrecht and the team at Agenhor, to expand its horizons. The result is Slim d’Hermès L’Heure Impatiente. “In the great adventure of Time, our goal at Hermès is to set the mind dreaming,” notes Philippe Delhotal, who is artistic director at La Montre Hermès. “For this watch, I delved into my own memories. Like most children and teenagers, I was always impatient when it came to waiting for the first day of holidays, or to open Christmas presents, or go on a first date. I remember the excitement and the build-up of emotions. Those are the feelings we want to rekindle with L’Heure Impatiente. Of course, we did have to resolve a certain number of technical problems along the way, hence the five years of development.”

A jubilant ritual

Indeed, a number of technical challenges separated the first sketches, jotted down at Baselworld 2012, from the finished watch, which signals the end of a sixty-minute countdown by a single chime. First of all, Agenhor had to develop a complementary module for the H1912 calibre, one of the two in-house movements that Hermès presented in 2012. As Jean-Marc Wiederrecht explains, one problem was how to use the energy supplied to the movement to also operate the countdown function and the chime. The next question was how to produce the clearest, longest single chime possible from the circular gong. After some two dozen trials experimenting with various materials and configurations, Wiederrecht chose a steel alloy. And just to prove that watchmakers also like to have fun, Agenhor’s module incorporates some rather unexpected components, such as a shark-shaped cam and a lever in the form of Pegasus flying over a basket of music notes.

Of course, these flourishes are invisible to the eye. The pleasure comes from knowing they are there, much like the willingness to step back and embrace the poetry of L’Heure Impatiente and its “jubilant ritual of setting the counter of the watch to the time of the eagerly awaited event. An hour before it occurs, the mechanical hourglass is set in motion at 6 o’clock on the dial. This complication is an exquisite torture that culminates when the single note rings out.” An experience reserved for the wearer of the watch, with the complicity of Hermès, and its philosophy of time.