Hits and Misses: Hands-On with Louis Vuitton’s Latest High Watchmaking Collections
This year’s LVMH Watch Week looked a little different. It was held in Milan just ahead of the Winter Olympic Games and was limited to a highly exclusive and mostly international guest list. As such, several of the maisons under the LVMH umbrella separately held their own dedicated events here in NYC to exhibit their latest collections as soon as the pieces came available stateside. We finally got our hands on Louis Vuitton’s newest high watchmaking novelties at its massive five-story flagship on Madison Avenue in New York City. In addition, we got the chance to preview a model that will debut later this spring, and spoiler alert: it’s going to knock your socks off. So, stay tuned for that in the coming months.
For now, let’s get down to it – we have a lot of ground to cover. Here, we have a slew of new watches joining two of Louis Vuitton’s core collections: the Escale and the Tambour. As a quick refresher, the maison broke from the traditional high fashion space and into the watch sphere back in the late 80s with the Monterey. However, it was really the Tambour, which came a few decades later just after the new millennium in 2002 that started to establish Louis Vuitton in the horological world. The collection has since become the cornerstone of the brand’s watchmaking identity with staying power over the past 20+ years. I guess I’m too giddy to jump to my favorite piece in the new lineup first – the Tambour was the frontrunner of the bunch for me.
Here, we get the first of many beautiful and intricate dial designs highlighting a variety of métiers d’art techniques in this range of high watchmaking pieces. By now, you probably know artist crafts are my wheelhouse and biggest passion in the world of watchmaking. For me, this work goes beyond appreciation and reverence – I have actually completed several apprenticeships in enameling and guilloche. With the newest Tambour, we’re looking at the latter: a stunning guilloche dial, one that’s not just tucked beneath the surface of the sapphire but available to appeal to two senses – sight and touch.
More specifically, this model falls under the Tambour Convergence subset, which debuted last year with the intention of unifying various ateliers under the La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton umbrella, both artistic and mechanical. The initial two 2025 models offered a “montre à guichet” or jumping hour display premiering the first self-winding movement to be fully designed and conceived by La Fabrique du Temps LV: the Caliber LFT MA01.01. With the initial pair, we got two wildly different ends of the spectrum: a simple and sober pink gold version and an extravagant platinum and gem-set version. With the new 2026 edition, I think the collection has finally found the sweet spot. We get the same general design and movement this time with just the right amount of visual interest and versatility thanks to the guilloche work emanating like rays of sunshine from the angular “cloud” shaped window at 12 o’clock displaying the hour and minutes – at least this is the visual metaphor it conjured for me. Personally, this 37mm model looked fantastic on my 5.75-inch wrist, and if I had $58,500 to burn, I’d scoop it up.
Moving on, we have several new takes on the Escale, a collection that first came into the brand’s catalog just over ten years ago in 2014, the same era that Louis Vuitton acquired La Fabrique du Temps. As such, the collection doubles down on haute horlogerie, which we see in the latest models. Probably the most overlooked addition to the Escale is the newest stone dial. Previously, we have seen turquoise and malachite iterations in platinum, and now we get a more subdued Tiger’s Eye version in yellow gold. This limited edition of 30 pieces reprises the oversized 40mm case proportions. While I’d personally like to see it downsized to 30-something, I can appreciate the intricacies of cutting the stone, and to my wrist, it wears smaller than other 40mm designs. In summary, no major updates here, and once again, the gorgeous dial is the star of the show.
Last among the wristwatches, we have a greater focus on the mechanics with three complicated models: two world timers, two twin zones, and a minute repeater. The world timers are clearly intended to be heavy hitters of the lineup, and while the watches are not personally my style, I have an immense appreciation for what Louis Vuitton has accomplished from the inside out in the way of both technical and artistic abilities. We have seen the complication as part of the collection since its 2014 origins, but the current version houses the new caliber LFT VO 12.01 movement, which offers improved legibility featuring a central minute hand and jumping hour display over the original caliber LV106. Alongside the classic model, there’s a world time tourbillon powered by the LFT VO 05.01. Impressive micromechanics aside, the showpiece of these world timers is, once again, the dials, which are mesmerizingly and meticulously hand painted with a fine-tipped brush to illustrate the corresponding flags using an impressive 35 different colors. More impressive yet, the tourbillon version uses enamel in place of ordinary pigment – words really can’t express the feat of working under these constraints with enamel.
Personally, things took a bit of a detour with the twin zones (if we’re sticking with travel-themed metaphors). I can acknowledge the precise functionality, refining the missing link between world timers that manage to display the time in each of the 24 main timezones simultaneously and dual-timers that indicate just two specific timezones. Here, we have two sets of hands mounted on a single pinion compared to the typical architecture of a GMT, which only adds an additional hour hand. The result allows for to-the-minute adjustment for those timezones with non-standard offsets. However, for me, when it comes to the design side of things, these watches fall short. Alongside some really exceptional and thoughtful dials in each of the other high watchmaking models, we have an engraved grid-style globe pattern: one giving a two-tone appeal in silver against a pink gold case and the other amplified even further in aventurine and framed by 170 baguette-cut diamonds on the bezel and 120 baguette-cut diamonds on the flange. For me, this takes the travel theme a bit too literally and dilutes the sophistication of the $57,500 and $229,000 models to caricatures of what these twin zones could be.
Rounding out the complicated pieces, let’s end on a high note (quite literally) with the Escale Minute Repeater. It’s always a challenge to describe the unique auditory experience of a repeater, and you should seek out that experience if you can, but I’ll do my best to paint a word picture until you can get the full effect. Here, you have our last example of that perfect balance between function and form. Beating at the heart, you have the caliber LFT SO 13.01, born from the shared heritage of La Fabrique du Temps and Gerald Genta, developed by Michel Navas and Enrico Barbasini, both of whom worked with Genta in the 90s.
The combination of a minute repeater and jumping hours is no small feat given the challenge of synchronizing two independent time-calculation systems: one dedicated to the striking mechanism and the other to the jumping display. Of course, there’s the added sensory layer of sound to take into consideration, which has been thoughtfully conceived through hand shaped, cut, and black-polished hammers and gongs. Here, the dial gets equal attention, highlighting the art of guilloche once more, this time in a more traditional fashion with a “flamme” pattern that radiates from the center.
In closing, I’d be remiss not to give honorable mention to the horological object alongside this collection of wristwatches. Here, Louis Vuitton’s “Camionette” or delivery truck gets reimagined in the form of a clock, complete with an iconic monogram trunk in tow, which houses the key to wind and set the movement. For more information, head over to Louis Vuitton.
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