Quality Travel Time: Hands On With The Louis Vuitton Tambour Taiko Spin Time Antipode

Most world time watches have a certain family resemblance, which is owing to the fact that virtually all of them are based, fundamentally, on the design originally developed by Cottier in the 1930s. One of the biggest exceptions to this general rule came from Louis Vuitton, in the form of the 2014 Escale World Time – the city disk was there, but the system for displaying the time relied on two concentric disks for the hours and minutes, passing under a thin yellow marker at 12:00 on the dial (and the dial, which was hand painted in multicolored squares inspired (says LV) by antique Louis Vuitton trunk monograms, was a dazzlingly different design move compared to more conventional world time designs. Earlier this year, at LVMH Watch Week, LV introduced several new Tambour Taiko Spin Time watches and one of the most interesting was another new take on the world time complication: the Tambour Taiko Spin Time Antipode.

The Spin Time watches began, when they were launched in 2009, as a variation on a jumping hours complication. The current hour was displayed on one of a series of twelve rotating cubes situated where you’d find the hour markers in a conventional watch; the cubes for the non-current hours were rotated so as to hide their numbers and display a colored face or some other design.

The basic spin time concept would go on to support a range of both time only and complicated watches, and in 2019 Louis Vuitton debuted the Spin Time Air – a semi-skeletonized version of the complication, in which the time cubes projected from the movement into an empty space in the case. For 2025, Louis Vuitton introduced a new design for the Tambour Spin Time watches – the Taiko case, with slimmed down proportions and redesigned lugs, although the signature tapering profile, from which the Tambour watches get their name, has been retained. The Taiko Spin Time Antipode uses the larger of the two new case sizes introduced, at 42.5mm in diameter and 12.45mm thick, in white gold.

The Antipode, like all world time watches, shows the current time in 24 cities around the world, in 24 time zones with full hour offsets from GMT. The hour at your location is shown adjacent to a yellow arrow; the cities are shown on rotating cubes adjacent to the hour numerals. You’ll notice that one city has white letters against a black background, and the other, black letters against a brushed metal background; the black background means it’s after 7PM in that city, while the brushed metal background means it’s after 7AM in that city.

In the image above, the time for New York is 12:48AM. Setting up the watch is simple. Pull out the crown to the first position, and you can set the yellow triangle adjacent to your chosen home city (New York, in my case). In the second position, the crown can be used to set the minute hand, and you just have to make sure that the minute hand is turned far enough to show the correct day or night display for the chosen home city.

The hour disk jumps one hour at the top of each hour, rotating counterclockwise, jumping crisply just as the minute hand passes the hour, with each city cube rotating in turn as the local time in the two cities show on the cube changes from 6AM to 7AM, and vice versa.

The Antipode gets its name from the geographic concept of an antipodal point, which is the point geographically on the opposite side of the Earth from any chosen location. In the above image, New York and Bangkok are on the same disk because they are antipodally located with respect to each other; the same for La Paz and Beijing, Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro, and so on. As the hour disk jumps from 6:59PM to 7PM for each location, the cube carrying the city names will rotate to show the change to evening for one city, and morning for another.

The design is surprisingly intuitive to set and to read – pretty much the only mental obstacle you have to overcome is any expectation that the Tambour Taiko Spin Time Antipode is going to behave like a conventional world time watch, and of course you have to remember that the cubes don’t rotate to show AM and PM, strictly speaking, but rather, the transition from daytime to evening, and from nighttime to dawn – day and night, rather than AM and PM.

The Taiko Spin Time watches also debuted new movements – in this case, the Louis Vuitton Spin Time caliber LFT ST12.01.

The movement is impressive both technically and aesthetically; the overall architecture and finishing is a departure in some respects from classical Swiss-French watchmaking, but the combination of polished edges and flanks on the bridges and mainplate, which borders a grained interior, gives the the movement a modern look and feel appropriate for the design of the watch overall. Power reserve is 45 hours, wound into the mainspring by the gold rotor, and the movement, which is adjusted to six positions, runs at the modern standard of 28,800 vph. Despite the extra height necessitated by the Spin Time world time complication, the movement is modest in its dimensions, allowing plenty of room for cubes large enough to be easily read.

In fact, legibility overall is terrific, as is wearability. The numbers for the case diameter and thickness might give the impression of a large watch but the look and feel on the wrist is very classical; maybe the most classical ever for a Spin Time watch, except for the 39.5mm models released at the same time. And I think it’s a fascinating take on both doing something really original with the Spin Time idea, and with doing something out of the ordinary for a world time complication. Engineering and design innovations in world time watches are extremely rare, and with the Tambour Taiko Spin Time Antipode, the folks at La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton have shown some rare creativity and ingenuity in what is generally one of the most tradition-bound complications.

The Louis Vuitton Tambour Taiko Spin Time Antipode: case, white gold, 42.5mm x 12.45mm, water resistance, 50 meters; sapphire crystals front and back. Movement, La Fabrique du Temps developed caliber LFT ST12.01, Spin Time world time complication with jumping hours disk and jumping day/night city cubes; power reserve, 45 hours, running at 28,800 vph.  See the Tambour Taiko Spin Time Antipode at LouisVuitton.com.