Discover Awake
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…
La laque Sơn Mài
For the manufacturing our dials, we have chosen a technique never before used in watchmaking.
Sơn Mài, or Vietnamese sanded lacquer, is one of Vietnam's oldest and most emblematic traditional arts.
This ancestral art, which consists of meticulously superimposing and polishing layers of natural lacquer to achieve a lustrous, mirrored surface, stands in stark contrast to other lacquer techniques found in China and Japan.
Indeed, Vietnamese tradition is to incorporate other materials into the lacquer, such as crushed eggshells, gold or silver leaf or mother-of-pearl, to add texture and depth, and thus achieve the stunning effects that give Vietnamese lacquers their unrivalled prestige.
The art of Vietnamese “Sơn Mài”:
mirror shine and depth.
It all begins with the meticulous extraction of sap from the Rhus Verniciflua tree, which grows in northern Vietnam and produces the most brilliant and precious lacquer. The sap is then treated to remove moisture and impurities, then filtered and dehydrated to obtain a pure, transparent lacquer, distinguished by its protective virtues and complex, shiny surfaces, to which natural pigments are added to create the vibrant palette of nuances found on SƠN MÀI dials.
The Shimmering Elegance of Silver-Leaf Gilding :
complexity and delicacy.
To bring texture and depth to our dials, we have opted for the traditional Vietnamese integration of pure silver leaf into the dial base: a complex and delicate method, giving the dials in the SƠN MÀI collection a unique and striking visual effect.
A first coat of lacquer is applied, allowing the silver leaves to adhere. These are then meticulously applied with a brush, then delicately dabbed to create exceptional texture and relief. Natural color pigments are airbrushed on to accentuate the visual effects. Between 10 and 15 layers of lacquer follow, protecting the dial and giving it shine and resistance over time, until the final polishing stage. The entire process, which can take several weeks, demands extreme precision and constant attention to detail, so that each dial in the Sơn Mài collection becomes a unique, captivating work of art of impeccable quality.
Innovative mastery of luminescence
for a distinctive visual signature.
Our new luminous signature is inspired by the Japanese aesthetic of chiaroscuro, a poetic approach evoked by Junichirō Tanizaki in his book “In Praise of Shadows”, in which he emphasizes that beauty lies in the subtle relationship we maintain with objects and the play of light that preserves their mystery. Faithful to our avant-garde mindset and our desire to shake up codes, we have rethought the traditional construction (luminova above) and imagined a unique luminous signature that magnifies the depth of our dials without compromising their purity or legibility.
The hands and hour-markers are made of a thin, solid and delicately machined base of Super-LumiNova® BGW9 material, then surmounted lengthwise by a faceted and polished steel cap to create a backlighting inspired by chiaroscuro. A unique creative approach that meets two essential criteria: to bring a touch of luxury, elegance and perfect legibility to the daytime dial, without detracting from the beauty and depth of the lacquer, and to sublimate in the dark the intoxicating spectacle of this living, surprising material by revealing the striking details and reflections of the silver leaf. A daring way to display time in a subtle, elegant way, while allowing the dials to emerge in hypnotic beauty...
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
