Franck Muller 'Crazy Hours'

We read an article in watch magazine Revolution recently and it featured a chapter on "The Elusive Franck Muller". We're not big fans of Franck Muller and frankly find his designs a bit too outrageous and exaggerated for our liking.

But after understanding how the enfant terrible of the watchmaking world came up with the idea of Crazy Hours, we do admire his creativity and his guts for challenging the norm.

The article's lengthy but brilliantly written. We would love to but be crazy to copy the entire chapter for you. Instead, here's an excerpt perhaps summarising his thoughts on creating Crazy Hours.

Crazy Hours Color Dreams

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But Muller's feeling was that civil time, the 24-hour day, binds man into a certain routine that he cannot escape from. He explains, "We are all formatted from the time we are born to follow a routine, to follow certain rules. At a certain time we wake, at a certain time we eat breakfast, at a certain time we take our bath, at a certain time we take our bath, at a certain time we go home, we eat dinner, we go to bed."

Ironically, it took a son of a Genevan to revolutionize the concept of time and to slip from its imperial clutches. Says Muller, "After a certain time, this becomes so much a routine that human beings are robbed of their spontaneous nature, of their creativity. You are told you should only make love to your wife in the evening, but according to what rule? Shouldn't something like this be regulated not by the rules of society but the rules of the heart? We are so programmed in our heads that our lives become a structure that we feel we cannot escape. We become so encoded that we are moving mindlessly from one moment to the next, never reveling in the present to truly enjoy the experience."

Indeed, the only time in our lives when human beings bestow unto themselves the freedom to enjoy life to its fullest, to exist and revel in its fullest sensual glory, is during the period that has become known in colloquial parlance as the "holiday".

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 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... The Crazy Hours is an escape from rules."

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So how does the watch actually reflect this freedom from rules? We think it's time you discover it yourself.