Luxury brands are always pursuing cultural relevance. Where many once focused their attention on pop culture and celebrity endorsements, today’s heritage fashion companies, jewellers and watchmakers seem more interested in forging partnerships with literary luminaries, choreographers, filmmakers and artists.

Founded in 1906 by husband and wife Alfred Van Cleef and Estelle Arpels on Paris’s Place Vendôme, Van Cleef &Arpels has always immersed itself in culture. In the late 1960s, an encounter between Claude Arpels and choreog- rapher George Balanchine resulted in the creation of Jewels, a ballet dedicated to precious stones and presented at the NewYork State Theatre.

Today the house plays a major role in supporting some of the world’s most important dance institutions, from The Royal Ballet in the UK to the Kanagawa Arts Theatre in Japan. It has also just introduced its own imprint with Italian publisher Franco Maria Ricci and runs L’École, a school of jewellery arts with campuses in Paris, Hong Kong, Dubai and Shanghai. There, people of all ages can sign up for courses in diamond grading, gemology or the history of art deco jewellery.

All of this is part of the reason why Van Cleef &Arpels is now in a position of power, with a growing appetite both for the stories that it has to tell and for the products that it has to offer. Signature jewellery lines, including the Alhambra, have found a new generation of fans, while its watch business continues to expand, with one-of-a-kind automatons and complications produced in-house. Its jewellery watches are also growing in popularity among female collectors and soon the house will also be renewing its focus on men’s timepieces – Pierre Arpels designed the brand’s first men’s watch in 1949 for his own use.

The brand’s new custodian is its CEO, Catherine Rénier, who spent 15 years in senior positions in the company before leaving to lead fellow Richemont house Jaeger-LeCoultre. Here, she tells Monocle about her homecoming and how she plans to maintain momentum.

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Why did you want to return to the brand as CEO?
I spent 15 years at Van Cleef &Arpels in the beginning of my career so coming back felt very natural. The maison has remained true to its identity: it has always offered a very positive vision of life and that hasn’t changed. But everything is now on another scale and the initiatives are more impactful. L’École, for instance, now has four permanent addresses. When I was leaving in 2018, we had hardly opened one. Our festival Dance Reflections has also greatly developed. The project has taken on a life of its own and has a big impact on choreographers and the world of contemporary dance. My role is to continue that and, of course, make sure that the brand’s very old identity continues to blossom.

Dance has long been a source of inspiration for the house. Is there power in consistency?
Nature, dance, everything related to love or luck – all of these territories of expression are very clear within the maison. You know whether something belongs within the Van Cleef &Arpels’ world or not. Even when you look at nature through the eyes of the maison, it’s about colour, blossoming flowers and spring – it’s not an aggressive kind of nature. There isn’t only a territory of expression but also a specific view of that territory. Our strength is in being clear about our identity and being consistent over time in expressing it and fuelling our designs with it.

The market constantly demands novelty. How do you find balance?
Being consistent doesn’t prevent creativity. You don’t always have to change your source of inspiration. Take love – it’s a universal theme and we can express it in one way through the complications on traditional watches and in a completely different way in our automaton watches. There’s no need for us to perpetually look for new themes. We fuel ourselves from our patrimony.

Speaking of your poetic complication, have you had to reconsider the purpose of the watch and even the way in which we tell time?
Watches started as useful objects, which people used to tell the time or even help them as they travelled between time zones. They played some of the roles that our phones now play. For a house such as Van Cleef & Arpels, it’s now a lot more about the poetry of time or presenting another view on time. For another watchmaking maison, it might be more about technical expertise and the mechanical engineering that goes into the watch as an object of craft and complexity. For us, the mechanics will always come after the story – we do it the other way around. We are thinking about storytelling first and then put the mechanism at the service of it. Watches now have to play a different role – they’re less practical tools and much more art objects. This really is important when it comes to the way that the public looks at mechanical watches.

With its signature padlock-shaped clasp, your Cadenas watch has stood out in the market this year. Why do you think that this design in particular appeals so much again?
It’s a piece that dates back to the art deco period, which was an inspiring time for the maison and the art world in general. It has aged extremely well because it hasn’t changed – it has just improved. It’s a bold design but also remains discreet.You have to wear it to really understand it. I hope that it will take more of the spotlight this year. There is a love story that’s built around it [it was inspired by the duke and duchess of Windsor] and this year it’s clearly one of the stars of the show for us.

Van Cleef & Arpels is primarily known as a jeweller. How did you go about developing your watch-making expertise?
We started with a partnership and looked for experts who could assist the maison in expressing its vision of time. So the first poetic complications were done with watchmaking experts who brought in the solution. But over the years, our vision of time required new developments, new patterns and innovations. We began to integrate this know-how within the company so that the collaboration between the research and development teams, the design studio, the enamelling team and the watchmakers became more fluid. Now they’re all based in our workshop in Geneva. Since 2022 the development of all of the modules for the poetic complications has been done in-house to enable the story to go a step further.

Is that why investing in education has been a focus?
We spend time and effort talking about these jobs. What does it mean to be a jeweller? What type of career can you have? We educate people about this side of our world. It’s like a pépinière[nursery], a breeding ground for young jewellers. Students are nurtured so that they can move on to take a role in one of our workshops. It’s a necessary effort because these jobs rarely come to mind when a young student is choosing their career path. You can’t just decide that you will go to an enamelling school – you have to find a spot in a workshop and be taught by a qualified enameller. So we have a role to play in creating more opportunities for older generations to share their experiences and convince younger people to join.

Slowly but steadily, interest in craft jobs is increasing. Is that the result of technology fatigue?
The world is always in search of balance. So traditional craftsmanship is serving as an answer to modern technology, to the very short life cycle of objects nowadays. You come to our world and you’re looking at timeless products.

As your watch business grows, so does your presence atWatches andWonders in Geneva. Why is the fair worth the investment for you?
It’s important for us to have a dedicated watchmaking moment to focus our attention on our watches, the novelties and the stories around them. More generally, the fair has risen to another level. It’s now a place where members of the public come at the weekend. Sales are not the objective; you have the boutiques for that. It’s more about education and bringing a new crowd into our world. I’ve seen young people and I’ve seen families with strollers – people are curious. It’s a rendezvous with watchmaking, like an art fair. It’s important for the industry at large because it shows how relevant watchmaking is today, even if you don’t need a timepiece to tell the time.
vancleefarpels.com