It is said to be immutable and untameable, but for Hermès, time is a friend. It gives a special patina to leather, and enriches history with many small stories. It is an authentic asset which fires the imagination. And for the newly launched Arceau Le Temps suspendu, Hermès has dreamed up a special journey leading visitors through a surrealist and lyrical world.
Arceau Le Temps suspendu is indeed a watch. But it is also far more than that: a playful moment on the wrist. Simply pressing the pushbutton at 9 oclock brings the hour and minute hands to a halt around noon, while the date hand slips out of view.
Timeis suspended or rather its display is suspended because the mechanism continues keeping track of civilian time, much as an orchestra might continue playing backstage, while the stage itself remains silent. Two minutes, three hours, five days or several weeks later, as the fancy takes you, another press on the pushbutton repositions the three hands in their rightful place: time that was temporarily suspended begins running again and the parenthesis is closed.
It is exactly that parenthesis that Hermès has evocatively staged in a themed route along which visitors lose themselves in space and time, in dreams and imagination. Welcomed by a line of hours, twelve women, each holding a balloon carrying the distinctive italics characterizing the hour-markers of the Arceau watch, and guided by boxwood men with their faces hidden by the foliage, visitors begin their initiatory journey in the cloakroom of time: a giant Swiss cuckoo clock in which they are invited to deposit everything that might remind them of the passing of time. Having thus lost track of any chronological order and understandably disorientated, they enter another dimension by moving to the other side of the watch dial.
Plunged into the darkness of a vestibule area, they feel as if they are lost in a forest, the Arceau Le Temps suspendu and Cape Cod Grandes Heures timepieces are presented on trees, like precious fruits, shining in the silvery light of an imaginary moon.
Price on request
Contact
Ethos Watch Studios
140 A, DLF Promenade, Nelson Mandela Marg, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi 110070
T: 011 45635146/47
Or
G 58, Ambi Mall, NH-8, Gurgaon
T: 0124-4665489/90
W: ethoswatches.com/locatestore.aspx#delhi