Discover AWAKE timepieces.
A new approach to Métiers d’Art
French creativity, Swiss watchmaking excellence and Vietnamese ancestral art combine to offer you the quintessence of traditional art and contemporary watchmaking, with an unrivalled value proposition.
AWAKE was born in 2019 with the ambition of combining passions and personal values in a project expressing the vision of its founder. Since its creation, the brand has embodied a pioneering, avant-garde and exemplary approach to the watchmaking industry, with a mission to draw attention to humanity's most precious asset: the Earth, in all its beauty and fragility. This mission is reflected in the brand's name: AWAKE, a verb meaning to awaken someone to something, to make them aware of it…
Collection features three artisan-crafted dials. Using layered Vietnamese lacquer and silver‑leaf gilding for frosted reflections, these Swiss-automatic watches evoke Earth’s oceans, forests, and soils.
La laque Sơn Mài
A Timeless Craft in Watchmaking
Sơn Mài, or Vietnamese sanded lacquer, is one of Vietnam’s most revered and ancient art forms. For the first time in watchmaking, this traditional technique has been adopted to create exquisite dials of unmatched brilliance. This ancestral craft involves the meticulous layering and polishing of natural lacquer to produce a lustrous, mirror-like finish.
Unlike other lacquering traditions from China or Japan, Sơn Mài stands apart through its distinctive incorporation of additional materials, such as crushed eggshell, gold or silver leaf, and mother-of-pearl. These elements imbue the lacquer with a depth and texture that is both visually stunning and emblematic of Vietnamese artistry. By integrating these techniques, the Sơn Mài dials achieve a level of prestige and intricacy that reflects the rich heritage and mastery of this time-honoured tradition. prestige.
The Creation Process
mirror shine and depth.
The journey to crafting a Sơn Mài dial begins with the extraction of sap from the Rhus Verniciflua tree, native to northern Vietnam. This sap, prized for its purity and brilliance, undergoes a rigorous treatment process to remove moisture and impurities, resulting in a translucent lacquer. Mixed with natural pigments, this lacquer forms the vibrant palette of colours characteristic of Sơn Mài. The artistry reaches its zenith when silver leaf is introduced to the dial base. Adhered with an initial coat of lacquer, these silver leaves are carefully positioned and textured with a brush to create striking depth. Between 10 and 15 layers of lacquer are then applied, each one painstakingly dried, polished, and sealed, culminating in a surface of unparalleled shine and durability. This intensive, weeks-long process transforms every dial into a captivating, one-of-a-kind masterpiece that exemplifies the pinnacle of craftsmanship.
The Elegance of Silver Leaf and Colour
complexity and delicacy.
Silver-leaf gilding is a hallmark of the Sơn Mài collection, adding a unique shimmer and intricate texture to the dials. Natural pigments, airbrushed with precision, enhance the interplay of colours and reflections, creating a dynamic visual experience. The multiple layers of lacquer preserve the brilliance of the silver leaf while ensuring the dial’s longevity. This technique, rooted in Vietnamese tradition, combines complexity and delicacy to produce a result that is both visually striking and technically sophisticated.
The interplay of colour, texture, and light on these dials offers an exquisite aesthetic, showcasing the unparalleled mastery of the artisans involved. Each dial becomes a luminous canvas, blending tradition with innovation, and delivering a timepiece that is as much a work of art as it is a functional object.
A World First
2 Métiers d'Art combined never before used in watchmaking.
For the first time in the history of watchmaking, two Métiers d'Art - Sơn Mài, Vietnamese sanded lacquer, and pure silver leaf gilding - come together to create unique dials, imagined and realized as works of art in their own right, and requiring between 10 and 15 hours of manual labor and concentration.
SƠN MÀI takes AWAKE's vision to a new dimension: that of Métiers d'Art, the sanctuary of handwork that elevates the craftsman to the rank of artist, and constitutes a cultural heritage whose poetry, rarity and beauty of techniques are passed down from generation to generation...
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60 min
