We go through life constraining things with definitions; categorising the unknown so that we might avoid risk. In doing so we cast the world into nameable colours, creeds and shapes.
It is a biological imperative. The unknowable is deferred to danger to us mammals, but it also the first step towards discovery and, often, where the magic happens.
In this civilisation we have eked out and squared off, Franck Muller’s Crazy Hours is a mechanical rebellion. The dial of this beloved, bewildering timepiece is a deliberately disrupted complication. Its numerals are all out of sequence and the dial lurches back and then leaps forth without rhythm or discernible pattern with each passing hour. It is highly impractical; miniature chaos wrapped around the wrist.
Unveiled at the World Presentation of Haute Horlogerie in Geneva, the limited-edition series reimagines Franck Muller’s already madcap Vanguard Crazy Hours through the anarchic lens of JISBAR, an artist best known for his remixing of art history’s greats with a contemporary fashion, music, and street culture. Here, the Crazy Hours dial becomes a canvas for JISBAR, each hour digit writ in his audacious chromatic vocabulary. The Crazy Hours x JISBAR collection offers a garbled dialogue that breaks the binds of language and order. It is a series of timepieces that resist categorisation and welcomes surprise. The resulting chaos reflects the unknown where anything might happen. It is living art in the realest sense of the term – surprising, ever-changing, dangerous fun.
They’re a good match, Franck and JISBAR. Franck Muller, the so-called “Master of Complications,” whose watchmaking genius lies in his manipulation of mechanical predictability, meets an artist whose entire aesthetic rests on spontaneity and collision. The union feels inevitable. “From our first exchanges, I knew we could create something exceptional,” JISBAR reflects. “This collaboration is the realization of years of work and reflection.” Both are disruptors in their respective fields, united by a shared belief that boundaries – between disciplines, eras, expectations – are meant to be broken.
The five editions of the Crazy Hours x JISBAR (crafted in carbon, steel, titanium, black titanium, and rose gold) are limited to just 50 pieces each. But the project goes far beyond wristwear. To accompany each model, JISBAR has created a corresponding artwork on linen canvas. He has also fragmented each into 50 signed, hand-enhanced pieces, one for each watch owner. This adds a personal touch when buying into the collection, with each owner tearing off their own piece of the original artwork to make their piece a one of one.
The collaboration begs the admittedly verbose question: what is the value of time when it is no longer measured in uniform increments, but in moments of surprise? Like JISBAR’s reinterpretations of Da Vinci or Botticelli, the Crazy Hours reinterprets time itself; remixing it, reframing it, and reminding us that chronology is a cultural construct as much as a mathematical one. The watch’s complication doesn’t simply tell time differently, it feels different. It behaves like an animal more than a machine. To give an answer to the above would be to the miss the point entirely.
JISBAR, whose art banks on juxtaposition – renaissance imagery colliding with pop references, street art merging with fine art – finds a kindred spirit in Crazy Hours’ provocative concept. Just as his canvases layer symbols and brushstrokes with knowing irreverence, this watch layers craftsmanship with chaos. The dial becomes a kind of glyph, simultaneously functional and symbolic, a kinetic painting whose motion evokes both wonder and defiance.
For Franck Muller, whose watchmaking heritage is built on world-firsts and technical innovation, the collaboration with JISBAR signals not just an aesthetic evolution, but a philosophical one. It’s a bold gesture that places the emotional resonance of the timepiece on equal footing with mechanical brilliance. It encourages us to feel, not just track.
In the end, the Crazy Hours x JISBAR is less a product than a provocation. It challenges our assumptions about time and art. It asks us to consider what it means to carry a piece of someone else’s creative spirit on the wrist, in the box, on the wall. And perhaps most importantly, it reminds us that time, like art, is not always linear. Sometimes it jumps, fragments, gets lost. It is by turns wasted and seized. We might seek to waste or kill it but the way it lives and changes is always surprising. And in those moments of surprise, we find something even more precious than precision: we find meaning.
