What you buy where you buy an Hermès watch
SINGAPORE — “What is an Hermès boutique doing in Manila?” a friend visiting from abroad once asked me. Of course, I didn’t have the answer. All I knew was many saw this as a badge of honor for our little Third World nation that could. The opening of the boutique, now a landmark along Makati Avenue with its unmistakable orange and velvety chocolate motif, was a glimmer of hope for fans of luxury in the country. There was a time when I couldn’t understand it, the fascination — nay, worship — for this “stuff.” And this is the reason luxury brands go out of their way to fly their best craftsmen over to the farthest regions of the Earth — so that people like myself could understand, and more importantly, appreciate the elaborate process that goes into every item without anyone having to go into a Miranda Priestly-esque rant.
Hermès did this recently for its “Mastery of Time” exhibit at Scotts Square in Singapore, bringing in glass engraver and Hermès master craftsman from the Czech Republic Kamil Faifer. The theme of the exhibit, instead of focusing on complications, brought to fore rare artisanal Hermès timepieces decorated using a variety of techniques. Kamil, hunched over his small lathe in one corner of the hall, carefully engraving geometric shapes on a shot glass, reminded me of the time I found myself watching a video of a young woman sewing a watchstrap by hand. I remember wondering why a video about a watchstrap had to be so dramatic — soft focus, soft music, a soft and soothing English woman narrating the scene. The video was shot in Biel, Switzerland, the nest of luxury watches and the site of La Montre Hermès, the brand’s in-house watchmaking facility.
Perhaps noticing that I was hovering, he handed me the shot glass and said, “See the detail?” I muttered an “Ah, yes” and returned the glass. It was a crisscross pattern and the glass seemed so thin — too thin to be subjected to repeated grinding against the machine’s abrasive wheel. “You have to make sure that 25 percent is untouched so you don’t make it fragile, but you can engrave on very thin glass. Even glass as thin as paper,” he said. Beside Kamil’s makeshift workplace are glass cases, one of which displayed one of his designs for Hermès Arceau Pocket Chevaux Sauvages, a pocket watch with a fired enamel dial and a front case of clear, leaded crystal engraved with a horse motif, an ever-present feature at Hermès. He created two designs — and only two exist in the world; the other one is in Europe. “It was a challenge because of the thickness of the glass and because it was a small piece, but the two designs are very similar,” he said.
Kamil’s father was a glass cutter, so he was exposed to the craft at an early age. At 15, he started making his own designs. “I like being responsible for what I do and not collaborate so the results rely on my own skill,” he said. “If I make a mistake, I polish it, and repeat. Sometimes it can get a little depressing when you feel like you’re never going to finish,” he joked. Each hand-engraved glass cover for the Hermès Arceau Pocket Chevaux Sauvages took 15 days to make.
Hearing Kamil describe his process, instead of demystifying the Hermès timepiece, painted a clearer picture of what it is — a piece of art, really — and even justified, for me, the drama in the old video. Waxing poetic, after all, is a classic Hermès move when it comes to watches. La Montre Hermès artistic director Philippe Delhotal shared, “My work is to find new ideas and translate them into watches, to do the most magnificent objects that make people dream. It’s a tough job. At the end of the day, I have to select the best ones.” The Dressage L’heure Masquée, French for “time veiled,” and the Arceau Le Temps Suspendu (“time suspended”) capture this predisposition for dreaming. Among the watches in exhibit, the former allows the wearer to conceal or reveal the time at home, or in a second time zone, while the latter encourages the wearer to set time aside — perhaps to live in the moment a bit more — by erasing the hands from the dial with a simple touch. At Baselworld 2014, Luc Perramond, La Montre Hermès CEO, said, “Here we are not in an arena of pure performance, timekeeping and accuracy. We are in a more poetic field where our goal is to make our clients dream and be enchanted. The techniques we developed with our watchmakers are developed with these poetic values.”
Every timepiece at the exhibit tells a story — of the passing of the time as a craftsman carefully pieces a watch together, or the playful absence of it on the wrist of a wearer who decides it is, for the moment, irrelevant. In that moment, the watch is not a watch, but it is nevertheless kept on. That’s what you get when you buy an Hermès timepiece, a watch so confident in its beauty, it doesn’t need to tell time to make one look.
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Hermès is located at ground floor, Glorietta 3, Ayala Center, Makati.
