The Return of the Timepiece That Made Serious Watchmaking Fashionable (EXCLUSIVE)
Louis Vuitton's sculptural Monterey watch was the first “fashion watch” to cross over from statement to substance. 40 years later, Louis Vuitton is pulling the Monterey out of the archives to achieve the same trick, except there’s now even more going on under the hood.
The Monterey was cool and, perhaps even a bit weird, because it was the fashion watch that wasn’t trying to be one.
Always ahead of its time, the Monterey returns at a moment where its early iteration is finally finding footing with a new generation of collectors best represented by modern fans like Tyler, The Creator.
For decades, “fashion watch” meant style over substance, a pretty face with a cheap engine worn for logo rather than movement. The term became shorthand for anything made outside Switzerland’s inner circle.
While other luxury houses, notably Chanel and Hermès, later transcended the “fashion watch” stigma, Vuitton's Monterey came first.
In 1988, the year that Louis Vuitton debuted its first timepiece, “real” watchmaking was defined by Swiss aesthetics, like thin gold cases, white dials, Roman numerals, and mechanical movements that prized precision over personality.
Louis Vuitton, then still new to watchmaking, went in the opposite direction. Instead of hiring an established watchmaker to create its new flagship design, the fashion house called on Italian architect Gae Aulenti, famous for transforming Paris’s Gare d’Orsay train station into the Musée d’Orsay.
Aulenti approached the Monterey’s design with a similar mindset to how she transformed a series of dated, dusty train platforms into a cutting-edge temple of art. She polished the conventional timepiece form into a smooth river stone with no lugs, no sharp edges, and a crown placed at twelve, making the Monterey look like a pocket watch sent back from the far-distant future. It looked nothing like the Swiss ideal, free of sharp geometry and mechanical bravado.
The Monterey's recent return to the runway as part of Nicolas Ghesquière’s Louis Vuitton’s Fall/Winter 2025 presentation is a reflection of its fashion heritage. But this new Monterey, limited to 188 pieces and priced around $59,000, goes even further than even its progenitor in cutting convention.
On the surface, the new model appears to stay true to Aulenti’s original, with a 39mm case cast entirely in 18k yellow gold and a white Grand Feu dial that upholds a centuries-old technique in which enamel is fired at high heat until it glows like porcelain.
But the biggest upgrade is inside, where the quartz movement has been replaced with an in-house automatic caliber built entirely at La Fabrique du Temps, Louis Vuitton’s Geneva manufacture run by watchmakers who once crafted pieces for Patek Philippe and Gérald Genta.
Here is where the new Monterey, which even arrives in its own miniature monogrammed trunk, plants a flag in the sand, demonstrating that this modern revival isn’t a nostalgia play.
It’s instead representative of Louis Vuitton's watchmaking foresight, proof that the luxury label entered the watchmaking business with a timepiece so futuristic that it took nearly four decades to catch up.
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