Van Cleef & Arpels arrived at Watches and Wonders 2026 with a collection anchored in celestial poetry, presenting five distinct novelties that range from haute horlogerie complications to jewellery watches of extraordinary craftsmanship. The theme, Poetry of the Heavens, draws a clear line between the Maison’s century-old fascination with the cosmos and its perpetual ambition to fuse artistic crafts with watchmaking expertise. As CEO Catherine Renier noted, the Poetic Complications collection, born in 2006, continues to grow richer with emotion and technical depth.
Midnight Jour Nuit Phase de Lune
The dial of the Midnight Jour Nuit Phase de Lune is arguably the most technically complex surface Van Cleef & Arpels has ever produced. The base sky consists of black Murano aventurine glass, developed in-house by VCA’s Innovation Department to achieve both a profound depth of colour and a shimmering, bronze-toned shimmer that evokes a true night sky. Over this field, a guilloché yellow gold Sun and a white mother-of-pearl Moon emerge and retreat behind a horizon shroud fashioned from guilloché mother-of-pearl and painted in a gradient from black to white. Stars surrounding the Moon use acrylic tracing, a deliberate material choice to keep the disc layers as thin as possible.
Four years of development went into the calibre, designed entirely at VCA‘s Geneva Watchmaking Workshops. The self-winding movement combines two complications: a Jour/Nuit 24-hour rotating disc and a second disc rotating at 24 hours, 16 minutes and 27 seconds to track the Moon’s 29.5-day cycle. The key engineering challenge was the on-demand animation triggered by a push-button on the case rim, which rotates the dial 360° for approximately 10 seconds. As Watchmaking R&D Director Rainer Bernard explained, the team had to account for phase-change accuracy during that extra rotation, all while minimising disc weight to reduce friction.
The 42 mm Midnight case is white gold, with the story continuing on the caseback. An engraving in white gold evokes the Moon’s topography, the Earth appears in enamel tracing on the sapphire crystal above the oscillating weight, and planets in miniature painting float against a guilloché background. The crown handles both time-setting and Moon phase adjustment.
Midnight Heure d’ici & Heure d’ailleurs
The 38 mm rose gold Midnight watch carries a dial that VCA‘s Geneva enamel workshop spent months perfecting. Inspired by the optical dichroism of rubies, enamellers developed a dense amber-brown enamel that shifts between warm and cool tones under different lighting, against a mirror-polished gold background that heightens reflections. A guilloché design radiates from a central piqué motif, referencing the Maison’s hallmark. Achieving two distinct colour intensities in the same enamel layer required working the material at under 500°C for over 30 hours, followed by two further firings above 1,000°C, and a final shaping stage using glassblowing techniques adapted for watchmaking tools.
The automatic movement, fully redeveloped for this reference, delivers a 65-hour power reserve and drives a dual time zone display using double jumping hours alongside a retrograde minutes hand. Two sector gears synchronise the Heure d’ici and Heure d’ailleurs discs so both hour windows advance simultaneously as the retrograde minute hand snaps back at 60 minutes. A single crown handles winding, time-setting, and both time zone adjustments.
The 38 mm rose gold case features polished and satiny finishing. The caseback carries an engraved Moon alongside a guilloché Sun, extending the celestial narrative away from the dial.
Ludo Secret
The Ludo Secret revisits the iconic bracelet-watch format the Maison created in 1934, with this 2026 edition drawing directly from a 1949 archetype. The bracelet links, in mirror-polished yellow gold, form the classic briquette construction assembled and adjusted by hand. Sapphires, selected by VCA‘s gemologists for consistent colour saturation and purity of cut, are set in generous crescent motifs across the gold surface. Pressing both sides of the jewellery buckle simultaneously reveals a white guilloché mother-of-pearl dial, with a baguette-cut sapphire serving as the 12 o’clock marker. The movement is Swiss quartz.
Perlée, 23 mm
New to the Perlée family, this 23 mm white gold watch introduces a Murano aventurine glass dial with a radiating guilloché finish, a technique VCA describes as innovative for this material. The guilloché striations interact with the aventurine’s natural copper-mineral sparkle to produce a layered luminosity. A double row of hand-polished golden beads frames the case, while diamonds pave both the case edge and the flange, selected to the Maison’s strict grading criteria. The time-setting button sits on the caseback, keeping the wrist-facing profile entirely clean. The watch ships with an interchangeable alligator bracelet plus a second bracelet choice from the Perlée collection range. The movement is Swiss quartz.
Lady Rencontre Céleste & Lady Retrouvailles Célestes
These two Extraordinary Dials watches narrate the legend of Vega and Altair, the star-crossed lovers of East Asian mythology. The Lady Rencontre Céleste in white gold renders the couple in blue tones, with champlevé and grisaille enamel backgrounds providing chiaroscuro depth. Clouds of plique-à-jour enamel set with diamonds allow light to pass through as a stained-glass window would, and a patented VCA technique allows precious stones to be set directly into the plique-à-jour structure with no additional metal support, creating a sense of weightlessness. The Lady Retrouvailles Célestes in rose and white gold uses champlevé enamel in pink and mauve, with sculpted white gold birds forming an aerial bridge between the figures. Both dials use miniature painting and rose-cut diamonds. The caseback of each watch carries the Summer Triangle asterism, engraved in the night sky.
Both watches run manual-winding mechanical movements. The cases combine rose gold, white gold, sapphires, mother-of-pearl, and diamonds.
A Final Word
Van Cleef & Arpels at Watches and Wonders 2026 confirms that the Maison has no interest in separating watchmaking from jewellery, and no desire to simplify either discipline. The depth of craft on show here, from four years of movement development for the Jour Nuit Phase de Lune to the two-year R&D cycle behind the enamel-setting patent for the Extraordinary Dials, speaks to genuine investment in original technique rather than visual novelty. Prices for this 2026 collection had not been officially disclosed in the press materials at the time of publication. Given VCA’s recent pricing on comparable Poetic Complications references, expect the Midnight Jour Nuit Phase de Lune to sit well above the six-figure mark, with the Extraordinary Dials pieces commanding prices available on request only. The Ludo Secret and Perlée models will likely sit at lower but still significant entry points into VCA’s jewellery watch universe. If the theme of Poetry of the Heavens sounds familiar, it is because Van Cleef & Arpels has been building this vocabulary since 1929. In 2026, it continues doing so with rare consistency and remarkable rigour.
