Bélier Watches

Bélier is the independent brand of Kim Djapri, a Dresden watchmaker who arrived at Baselworld 2016 as a new AHCI candidate with one of the most conceptually elegant debuts in memory — a watch that runs backwards, and makes a profound point in doing so. Djapri's pedigree is Saxon fine watchmaking at its highest level: a watchmaker with Lang & Heyne, Dresden's celebrated haute horlogerie house, and boutique manager at Tempus Arte, the group's retail home. The brand name is personal — Bélier is French for Aries, his zodiac sign — and its founding creation, christened the Reverse, is what Quill & Pad called a perfect allegory for reflection in a timepiece. The premise: almost no one has ever truly seen themselves in a mirror, since a single reflection reverses the image — and the Reverse extends that idea to horology. Its movement is almost literally a classic movement seen in a mirror: what you face on the dial side is, in essence, the back of a traditional time-only caliber brought to the front, with everything where it should be but backwards. The hours and minutes run counterclockwise, the numerals descend around the dial accordingly (printed forward-facing — one must be able to read it), and the small seconds at its subdial turns counterclockwise too. It appears completely normal until you look closely — and then the reality lands.

Behind the wit lies a genuine horological argument: clockwise motion is an accident of geography. The sundial — the clock's ancestor — was invented in the northern hemisphere, where horizontal dials cast shadows sweeping left to right ('sunwise'); but vertical wall-mounted sundials run the opposite way, and famous timekeepers like the counterclockwise astronomical clock of Münster Cathedral preserved that alternative — a fitting lineage for a German watchmaker's counterclockwise masterpiece. The execution matches the concept. The mirror-polished balance bridge carries a faceted ruby capstone in a screwed gold chaton, in the manner of the finest historical pieces — while the modern anti-shock assembly, rather than being sacrificed to tradition, is ingeniously relocated to the movement's other side, its spring clip visible through the caseback: the classic and the contemporary coexisting exactly as the design demands. Details abound — symmetrically mirrored blued screws, a 'floating' subsidiary seconds ring mounted on a sapphire disc so the mechanism peeks through beneath, gothic points on the balance wheel's spokes, a polished contrast ring on the blued seconds hand, a single oversized counterbore at 9 o'clock for visual intrigue, and a hand-engraved border rippling like rain on a pond around the rear winding works, beside the endearing engraving 'Made with Passion.'

The Reverse is a 46.4mm statement offered in pink gold (€49,900), white gold (€54,900), or platinum (€68,200), powered by the manually wound Bélier Manufacture Caliber B-01R — 25 jewels, hours, minutes, and seconds with a stop-seconds mechanism — and strictly limited to 33 pieces, eleven in each metal. The enthusiast press was unanimous in its verdict: an entirely independently made watch finished to an incredible level, from a new talent whose emergence, as Quill & Pad put it, bodes well for the future of independent watchmaking — proof that in the right hands, even the direction of time itself is open to question.