{"id":2092781,"date":"2026-09-28T10:31:34","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T08:31:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/?p=2092781"},"modified":"2026-09-30T07:28:53","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T05:28:53","slug":"vacheron-constantin-metiers-art-hommage-regne-animal-en","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/2026\/09\/28\/vacheron-constantin-metiers-art-hommage-regne-animal-en\/","title":{"rendered":"Vacheron Constantin M\u00e9tiers d’Art Hommage au R\u00e8gne Animal: six crafts face the infinitely small"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In a pocket of air no more than 4 millimetres deep between the sapphire crystal and the dial plate<\/sup>, ordinary craft is doomed to suffocate. For its series M\u00e9tiers d’Art Hommage au R\u00e8gne Animal<\/em>, developed within the transmission programme One of Not Many Crafts<\/em>, Vacheron Constantin has deliberately pushed six practitioners out of their comfort zones<\/sup>. None of them had ever set their practice within the confines of a watch case<\/sup>. The architecture of the manufacture calibre 2460 G4 supplies the mechanical premise of the project: by replacing the central hands with four trailing and jumping discs set in peripheral apertures for the hours, minutes, day and date<\/sup>, the movement frees the central space<\/sup>. Yet this cleared surface offers no respite in execution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the dial of the Feathersnake<\/em> piece, the feather artist Julien Vermeulen had to set aside his workshop tools to fashion a micro-scalpel from the body of a reshaped needle<\/sup>. The material imposes a silent violence: the tiniest fragments taken from seven rare Lophophore feathers measure barely a few tenths of a millimetre<\/sup>. The rachis was meticulously excised to keep only the barbs, mounted on tissue paper before being pressed onto a metal matrix rising 3 millimetres above the surface<\/sup>. At this microscopic scale, an uncontrolled breath scatters the work, and the mechanical amplitude of the pulse in the fingers forces the artisan to stop after four hours of daily concentration<\/sup>. Two hundred and fifty hours of surgical adjustments were needed for the reptile’s eye, set in gold and enamel, to anchor a landscape in which natural iridescence replaces paint<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ordeal is the same for the Venetian glassmaker Simone Crestani on the Glassoctopus<\/em><\/sup> piece. Accustomed to monumental works, the artisan had to reinvent his torch-fusing method to build a three-dimensional figure 3.5 millimetres high on a midnight-blue lacquered guilloch\u00e9 gold dial<\/sup>. Working point by point with bespoke tungsten tips designed to prevent thermal collapse of microscopic filaments<\/sup>, he composed each tentacle with the optical distortions of transparent glass in mind<\/sup>. The mechanical constraint is unforgiving: two arms of the cephalopod must overhang the time apertures, whose rims stand proud by only 0.2 millimetre<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This reduction in scale strikes the material with the same intransigence in Anna Le Corno’s wood marquetry (Woodenwings<\/em>)<\/sup>. Working under a binocular microscope with tungsten-carbide scalpels and bits sourced from Japan<\/sup>, the cabinetmaker had to select twelve wood species, from birch madre to smoked eucalyptus<\/sup> \u2014 chosen not only for their grain or hue, but for their structural resistance to microscopic fraying<\/sup>. For Laura Baverstock’s gold-embroidered tiger (Tigerbroidery<\/em>), the 375\/1000 gold thread \u2014 its metallic stiffness defying a fine 0.25-millimetre needle \u2014 required a purpose-built loom and the drilling of a dedicated titanium dial plate<\/sup>. Further along, Marianne Gu\u00e9ly’s monochrome crocodile (Papercroc<\/em>) sets pure cotton fibres of 250 and 300 grams against embossing heated to 70\u00b0C<\/sup>, while Anya Midori (Oraygami<\/em>) folds her manta rays bare-handed and without a loupe from rectangles of 20-gram Japanese paper reduced to 6 millimetres<\/sup>. On the back of the six 42-millimetre cases<\/sup>, the 916\/1000 gold oscillating weight, engraved with the profiles of scalpels, needles and pliers,<\/sup> is a reminder that the watch captures not an animal motif, but the trace of tools reinvented to survive the infinitely small<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To assemble the feline’s stripes on Tigerbroidery<\/em>, the copper wires were coated with a fine layer of black ceramic developed specially for the project<\/sup>, thereby avoiding metallic lustre in favour of a matt black that absorbs light beneath the sapphire<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This 18-carat 5N pink gold creation pairs four M\u00e9tiers d’Art techniques \u2014 hand-engraving, hand-guillochage, hand-enamelling and gem-setting \u2014 to highlight the seahorse parading around the tourbillon.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Homo Faber 2026, Vacheron Constantin moves the frontier of watchmaking by inviting six artisans from disciplines that do not, originally, belong to the classical vocabulary of the dial.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":214,"featured_media":2080151,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30122],"tags":[53550,65162,53662,60800],"class_list":["post-2092781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-watches-and-jewelry","tag-arts-and-crafts","tag-fine-watchmaking","tag-know-how","tag-vacheron-constantin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2092781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/214"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2092781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2092781\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2080151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2092781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2092781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2092781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}