This year, Revolution turns 20. Two decades of chronicling watches, people and ideas have given us a front-row seat to a remarkable story: how an age-old craft has both preserved its soul and reinvented itself for the 21st century. To celebrate, we’ve chosen over 100 names and milestones that, for us, define the era so far. From leaders to watches, you can see the whole list here.

The Van Cleef & Arpels Lady Arpels Pont des Amoureux, introduced in 2010, is one of the rare watches of the last two decades to alter the conversation around complications. Across its dial, a man and a woman cross a Parisian bridge, each figure tracking time — she the hours, he the minutes. Twice a day, at noon and midnight, they meet at the center for a kiss. A discreet pusher allows the embrace to be replayed at will, pausing time for a brief mechanical interlude.

The movement that makes this possible was conceived in collaboration with Agenhor, the Geneva atelier led by Jean-Marc Wiederrecht and his family. Built on a ValFleurier base, the module contains 339 components, each devoted to the lovers’ choreography. Retrograde mechanisms guide their progress along the bridge; springs and levers carefully manage the hesitation, the encounter and the retreat. It is a complication devoted not to data but to drama, an automaton scaled for the wrist.

The decoration is as considered as the engineering. The dial is portrayed in grisaille enamel, a 16th century technique revived here with remarkable delicacy. Achieving its depth requires multiple firings and dozens of hours of patient layering. The lovers are sculpted in gold, the bridge arched with architectural precision, while bezels often sparkle with diamonds — a reminder that Van Cleef & Arpels has always stood at the intersection of watchmaking and high jewelry. This idea of narrative watchmaking is not new.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Jaquet-Droz and other masters built automaton watches for royal patrons in Europe and China, filled with birds that sang, flowers that bloomed and actors that played across miniature stages. By the early 21st century, however, haute horlogerie had come to prize a narrower range of accomplishments: tourbillons, astronomical displays and calendars designed to tame centuries. The Pont des Amoureux pushed back against that orthodoxy. It argued that in the modern era, emotion itself could justify a complication.

The watch was recognized immediately, earning the Ladies Watch Prize at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève the year it debuted. The accolade mattered less than the shift it represented. Here was a serious, finely made complication whose purpose was to move its owner, not overwhelm with technical bravura. In doing so, Van Cleef & Arpels reintroduced a forgotten dimension of horology — the conviction that a watch can be as much about feeling as it is about function.

Tech Specs: Van Cleef & Arpels Poetic Complications Pont des Amoureux

Movement: Manual winding Agenhor-designed automaton module, built on Jaeger-LeCoultre Caliber 846; 36-hour power reserve
Functions: Retrograde hours and minutes
Case: 38mm × 11.8mm; 18K white gold, often with diamond-set bezel; water resistant to 30m
Dial: Grisaille enamel night-sky scene with Parisian bridge; two sculpted gold lovers as retrograde hour and minute hands; lovers meet at noon and midnight for a kiss, or on-demand via automaton mechanism
Strap: Alligator leather with pin buckle