The Legend of Franck Muller - Westime

“To me, in modern
culture, we are
often too much
rooted in the
past or obsessed
by the future”
He states, “Why call it Crazy Hours?
Because the Crazy Hours watch had to be a
statement that you can do what you want,
whenever you want. It had to be a watch
that told people that life is precious and that
you must enjoy each fleeting moment. It
was a declaration that you should exist in
the present and not constantly be thinking
about the past or the future. It had to be a
rupture from the structure of empirical
time, an escape from the mindless regularity
that we as human beings have become
enslaved to. This idea came to me at that
moment in the swimming pool in Mauritius,
where I had come with my family to be on
vacation, where we thought we could do
what we wanted. But instead, we were met
only with rules and more rules. The Crazy
Hours is an escape from rules.”
And while at first glance, it might be
easy to dismiss this philosophy as
promiscuously sensualist, the very
concept of the Crazy Hours has strong
spiritual undertones. Muller states, “I’ve
always liked the Buddhist parable of the
monk who falls down a cliff. Beneath him,
he sees a starving tiger waiting to eat him.
Above him, he sees a snake slithering down
to bite him, then suddenly, just in front of
him, he sees a perfect strawberry. Slowly
and with great deliberation, he reaches out
and plucks this strawberry and tastes how
delicious it is. To me, in modern culture, we
are often too much rooted in the past or
obsessed by the future. Unfortunately, the
traditional format for a watch only
encourages this. On the dial, you see all the
time in front of you and all the time behind
you. And so, you become obsessed with the
past and the future, and never appreciate
the moment you are in. For me, it was very
important that the Crazy Hours be a watch
in which the past and the future are not
visible. As such, you have no choice but to
be in the here and now, and to appreciate
the present — this is something people have
forgotten how to do!”
THE WORLD’S FIRST
EMOTIONAL COMPLICATION
Imagine a watch where the dial adheres to
no laws of order of either God or man. The
cold, rational intellectualism of the 12-hour
dial is dispensed with, and in its place, a
whirl of randomly strewed digits each
claiming their precious real estate with a
free-wheeling assertion of self. At the 12
o’clock position, the number eight — the
Chinese symbol for luck — stakes its claim
with heady optimism. The Crazy Hours
dial, as the name implies, bears no logic, it
defies rationality; it could, if expanded onto
canvas, be found in the Pop repertoire of