Race against time, into the future

“The focus in 2011 is on the development of the ‘Time to Dream’ concept. We need to communicate a new territory around a very unique and unconventional technical innovation,” said Luc Perramond, CEO of La Montre Hermès. “We must enchant the customers.”
The idea of uniting information and entertainment in timepieces is not new. Since time started to be measured in a mechanical way, there have always been additional leisure complications to make a clock or a watch a bit more interesting – allowing the wearer to interact with the timepiece, from classical complexities like alarms, minute repeaters and grande sonneries to the naughty theatre of the erotic complications, and even those that tweak the symbolic meaning of time.
Hermès came up with its first watch collection in 1928 and established a factory in Switzerland in 1978 to enhance production. To have legitimacy in watchmaking, a brand has to present original mechanical complications; Wiederrecht and his company, Agenhor, fit the bill as the perfect partner. After almost four years, a star was born: a timepiece that conceals time and erases its indication from the dial, freezing the hands while the mechanics continue to ceaselessly march forward.

Issued in a limited edition of 50 pieces with a futuristic look completely different from the classically-minded Arceau Time Suspended, the Key of Time also boasts a flying tourbillon and embodies a certain relativity theory: sometimes time passes faster, at other times slower.
An “irregular” retrograde hour display, it celebrates the notion that time flies when we’re having fun and,goes more slowly when we’re not. At the recent Baselworld fair, two of the most talked-about watches of the exhibition also created the illusion of governing time: the Hublot Key of Time and the Hermès Time Suspended.
Both watches follow in the footsteps of a few brands that are not necessarily known for big mechanical complications, thus far chiefly featuring specialties and poetic variations in order to attract more exposure. Van Cleef & Arpels, better known for its jewelry, won the 2010 Ladies Watch of the Year Award at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève with a watch developed by Jean-Marc Wiederrecht called Le Pont des Amoureux. Hermès, faithful to its quality of workmanship by the best craftsmen, decided to hire Wiederrecht to complete something quite different.