Fading Hours

A finalist for the 2025—2026 Louis Vuitton Watch Prize, Fading Hours is a mechanical alarm watch built for an unmet need of our time: carving out space for deep, uninterrupted work. The smartphone is poorly suited to this — a device built to interrupt, dressed as a tool. Existing alarm watches were made to startle, not to guide. Quiet Club started from a blank slate: a new mechanism, a new complication, designed to answer a specific human problem. The great watchmakers had always worked this way — the minute repeater, the tourbillon, each an answer to a need of its age. Moving forward, it turned out, meant returning to where it all began.

The watch carries two dials. The outer ring is pure silver, flame heat-treated white by hand. The inner disc is white gold — machined to ring at a specific frequency, then polished and sand-blasted. A hammer stands upright in the case and strikes the underside of the inner disc from behind, causing the entire face to vibrate and sing. The tone is closer in character to a chiming complication than to a conventional alarm: designed to draw the wearer back to the present, not startle them out of it. This construction — the dial as gong, the hammer vertical — has no precedent in wristwatch design.

The only drawn element on the dial is a single vertical line in Grand Feu enamel, running from twelve to six. Everything else was removed. No brand name. No text. No logo.

A single button concealed in the crown sets and starts the alarm. Beneath it, a system of levers and clutches couples the bezel, alarm hands, time hands, status indicator, and hammer in sequence on each press. Alarm time is set by rotating the knurled bezel, which positions a concealed pair of alarm hands beneath the primary ones.

The movement is designed, engineered, and hand-assembled by Norifumi Seki — winner of the 2020 F.P. Journe Young Talent Award — in his workshop in Asakusa, Tokyo. Every in-house component is hand-bevelled and finished individually. 18000 vph. 40 jewels. 48-hour power reserve. Grade 5 titanium case, 40.6mm × 12.5mm, bowl-form geometry, 44.9mm lug-to-lug. Double anti-reflective sapphire crystal front and caseback.