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.
Cait Bazemore
2026-03-17 18:00:00