A Louis Vuitton Escale World Time, With Hand Painted Dial
A world time watch with a daringly different design.
As a general rule, worldtimers all tend to follow pretty much the same playbook when it comes to design, and with good reason. A worldtimer’s purpose is to show the time in 24 (or in at least one rare case, more than 24) time zones around the world simultaneously and the usual arrangement is so familiar to most serious collectors that it hardly needs a description. One of the rare exceptions to the rule is a watch that was released by Louis Vuitton back in 2014, and which showed that while the classic design – as first envisioned by Louis Cottier in the early 1930s – has a lot going for it (including elegance, and long-standing tradition) it’s not the only way to fly. That watch is the Louis Vuitton Escale World Time.
The standard arrangement for world timers was extensively modified by Louis Vuitton for this 2014 release, which came just a few years after LVMH acquired La Fabrique du Temps in Geneva. At first it’s difficult to understand, if you’re used to looking at conventional world time watches and you might wonder if you’re looking at one of those hybrid GMT watches that has a ring of reference cities on the dial, but which is actually a two time zone/GMT watch. This is however, a true world time complication, with a couple of twists.
Instead of conventional hands, the Escale World Time uses two rotating disks – the hour disk is marked with 24 hours, and the minutes disk is inside. Setting the watch is straightforward – you set your local time city at the top of the dial, so that the yellow arrow’s pointing to it, and then you set the local time; both can be done from the crown. The time in any time zone can then be seen simply by reading off the hour adjacent to the reference city on the dial. In the above example, the local time is 10:10 AM in Los Angeles, and 13:10, or 1:10 PM, in New York, and so on around the dial. Since all the reference cities are, as usual for world timers, full hour offsets from GMT, the minutes shown for local time are correct for any other time zone as well. As with other classic world timers, the only disadvantages to the system are that it can’t account for changes between winter and summer time, nor can it show the time in time zones with non-full hour offsets from GMT – but that’s true of just about every other world time watch as well (the only world time watch that is set up to adjust for summer and winter time changes, is the Bovet Récital 28 Prowess 1).
The Escale World Time was in addition to being an extremely colorful and innovative take on the world time complication, also the launch platform for the Escale case design, which draws inspiration from the hardware found on Louis Vuitton’s trunks; the Escale case was relaunched recently in a collection of time-only watches as well. The connection between the trunks and the watch cases is a subtle one; the brackets on the trunk corners are reflected in the shape of the lugs, but if you didn’t know anything about the design of Louis Vuitton trunks I think you’d still find the case and lug designs interesting in their own right.
The dial, on the other hand, was nothing short of shocking when it the watch was first released – shocking, but also a real breath of fresh air in the tradition-bound world of world timers.
The dial takes over 50 hours to make and there are a total of 38 different colors used; according to Louis Vuitton, the symbols are inspired by vintage LV trunk monograms. I have no reason to think this isn’t true, but the symbols have always reminded me of nautical signal flags, which given the origin of Louis Vuitton’s trunk designs during an era when steamships were making regular global travel possible for the first time, is not a bad association. The International Code Of Signals, which outlines the designs used for the flags, was first codified in 1854, just a year after the founding of Louis Vuitton.
The areas of color are filled in with so-called cold enamel (a thermosetting epoxy resin widely used for dial miniature painting) and the individual cells are so tiny that the artisan who works on the dials uses a brush made from a single squirrel hair. Filling in the cells is extremely difficult – well, maybe not for someone with years of practice and a natural talent for the job, and an unnaturally steady hand but if you visit La Fabrique du Temps in Geneva, you may be given an opportunity to try it yourself. It’s a humbling experience, and I say that as someone who’s been through a fair number of ritual humiliations of the visiting watch journalist – this is right up there with trying to pin a balance spring to a balance staff, or black polish a screw head the size of a fly’s eye.
The result, though, is a jubilant expression of the exhilaration of travel and although the design is certainly out of the ordinary, it has its own logic and its own idiosyncratic beauty. More than a decade after its launch, there’s still nothing like it – the sense of boldness and freshness in design, as well as meticulous care in execution, is still there after all these years, but the design has, as very few designs that break with tradition this much manage to do, become in its own right, a classic and an icon of modern watch design.