Wrist Check: The Louis Vuitton Tambour, Steel On Steel

When Louis Vuitton launched the latest Tambour watch earlier this year, it represented a major departure and a new beginning. The departure was from business as usual for the Tambour case, which has historically been used for watches that were thick, the better to show off the unique, tapering, drum-like case shape that gave the Tambour collections their name, and which Louis Vuitton has also tended to use for some of its most complex watches, up to and including the GPHG award-winning Carpe Diem, as well as LV’s unique Spin Time complication. The new Tambour, on the other hand, retained the basic case geometry but in a slimmed-down form factor that was a lot more suitable for every day wear (and it is in fact, and obviously, intended to be a daily driver, at least as much as an $18,500 watch can be).

The result was a watch that seemed, seen against the history of the preceding Tambour watches, almost self-effacing, at least at first. In person and on the wrist, however, the watch has a lot of very carefully thought out details which add up to quite a lot more than the sum of their parts, and I was surprised at just how sophisticated the design came to feel after wearing one for a few days.

Certainly, the Tambour is thin for a Tambour, at 40mm x 8.8mm (the Carpe Diem, by comparison, is 46.8mm x 14.42mm, although pretty much everything is going to be thinner than a memento mori automaton wristwatch anyway). The watch, like every Tambour, is narrower at the top than at the bottom and this reverse taper gives the watch a low center of gravity on the wrist. That plus the overall case dimensions make this an extremely comfortable watch.

Louis Vuitton is not billing this as an extra flat watch but it is on the slim side – for comparison, the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Jumbo in steel, reference 16202, is 39mm x 8.1mm. The Patek Philippe 5811 in white gold is 41mm x 8.2mm, and Vacheron Constantin’s time-only Overseas, in steel, is 41mm x 11mm. The Tambour’s relative thinness is partly thanks to the movement – caliber LFT023, 30.6mm x 4.2mm, with a 50 hour power reserve, is a micro-rotor movement, which helps keep the overall thickness down. One of the most interesting competitors in the field is the Chopard Alpine Eagle Cadence 8HF, which has a high frequency, full rotor automatic movement running at 57,600 vph (versus the 28,800 vph that is more or less the standard for all modern watches) in a 41mm x 9.75mm case, and which at $20,300 is very competitively priced as well. However, the Tambour offers a design which seems less reliant on echoes of other classic integrated bracelet steel sports watches, and a movement which while not as technically interesting as Chopard’s 01.12-C, is more interesting visually (and whose micro-rotor design makes for a slimmer case).

All that said, while this is not an extra flat watch by the numbers (though it’s close)I don’t know that I’d want this watch to be any thinner than it is. The vertical taper of the Tambour case needs, I think, a little bit of thickness in order for the design to read visually and past a certain point flattening out the case any further might result in the case design losing some of its three dimensional appeal as well.

The movement’s design is organized around three large circular spaces – one is for the micro-rotor; one is for the balance, and the third, at 3:00 in the photo, looks like part of the mainspring barrel. There are five jewels visible between it, and the micro-rotor which I assume are pivots for the automatic winding system – in any case there doesn’t seem to be any other place to put the gears for the winding train. The bridge carrying the “Swiss Made” lettering looks like it’s carrying the pivots for the going train, with a wheel for the small seconds on the other side of the dial at roughly 9:00. The movement was specifically designed to support a small seconds hand, rather than a center seconds hand – most modern watches with small seconds hands are actually built on center seconds calibers, with additional gearing to support a small seconds hand. The movement was produced in collaboration with movement constructor Les Cercles de Horlogers and is based on the micro-rotor specialist’s caliber CH200.CHSA).

The shapes of the bridges are quite elaborate and the frosted surfaces combined with the beveled edges, accentuate the geometry of the movement and give it a very modern appearance. The goal seems to have been to create a novel and visually interesting design, rather than to make something that is a platform for showing off traditional hand-finishing techniques. The latter in any case are almost never found in modern automatic movements anymore; one exception is probably any complication from AP or Vacheron that uses the JLC 920/Vacheron 1120/AP 2120 as the base, but these are few and far between and generally at least an order of magnitude more expensive that the Tambour.

Overall the impression I get from the movement is of very well thought out design. The only very minor disappointment is the balance spring stud and regulator, which look like standard Etachron components and detract ever so slightly from the sleek, urban post-modernist vibe of the rest of the caliber. A free sprung balance with timing weights would really close the deal, but using such a balance and spring, with Patek style Gyromax weights, or with adjustable screws a la Rolex’s Microstella system, would require either the additional expense of making and adjusting such a system (as in the case of Patek) or economies of scale (as in the case of Rolex) which Louis Vuitton won’t have with the somewhat limited production we can expect of the Tambour.

And in any case, what most clients and potential clients for the Tambour are really going to notice, and what is really going to close the deal, is how the watch plays with depth, and light.

The Tambour dial is remarkable for the degree to which it changes character as the light around it changes. As you can see in the image above, the center of the dial has a very subtle vertically brushed pattern which acts as a kind of mirror to the world around the watch; it is not actually the deep brown seen in the image, which instead it has picked up from the camera bag (a very battered Domke which has been around the world with me several times, and looks it) on which it was shot.

The watch may be relatively thin, but the arrangement of the various layers of the dial and the high relief of the numerals, gives it a sense of depth which is very unusual for a watch this thin; I would say that it’s one of the most cleverly designed dials I’ve seen in some time. Most thin automatic watches are designed in such a way as to emphasize their flatness; Louis Vuitton seems to have gone in the opposite direction, and decided to create a physically fairly flat watch which at the same time, creates the impression of depth which has always been the stock in trade of the Tambour design.

The outer chapter ring has V-shaped cuts at each five minute mark and for the inner hour chapter ring, there are alternating applied markers and Roman numerals. The outer chapter ring steps down to the inner hours chapter ring with a beveled surface that is mirror-bright and picks up ambient light very effectively and the applied markers on the hour chapter ring, almost seem like they were cut out of the outer ring and then shifted inward; a remarkable visual effect. The bracelet seems very well connected to the rest of the design and flows organically, visually speaking, through the case. “Louis Vuitton” is stamped on the bezel but it’s pretty subtle – you almost have to know it is there to look for it in the first place.

The hands are skeletonized and the void in the outer half of each hand is filled with luminous material.

This is a watch which more than many others I’ve seen, begs to be worn to be appreciated. The degree to which it captures, and plays with, light and reflections is very unusual and watching the appearance of the watch shift as the light shifts, in color, direction, and intensity, makes the Tambour seem like a prism through which to appreciate the colors of urban life. It’s almost cinematic.

I can’t think of a watch I’ve had in for review in recent years which has surprised me so much. The sense of depth you get from what’s basically a pretty flat watch is unusual to say the least – I don’t think there is another stainless steel, integrated bracelet sports watch that has this much capacity to give back much more than you expected to get from it.

That there was a lot of thought that went into the design seems obvious – the small seconds for instance, helps keep the height down, but it also provides an additional layer of depth, which might actually be more important; and I feel like somebody really thought through what that vertically brushed center sector would look like under varying light (and whoever that somebody is, I hope they bought him an extra beer for lunch, or maybe an extra glass of Fendant, this is Geneva after all).

The Tambour is a lot of things, one of which is of course the opening move in a strategic repositioning of Louis Vuitton’s watchmaking – I said up top that the Tambour represented a new beginning, and for LV’s watches, it means that the entry point will now be a very well thought through luxury sports watch with an integrated bracelet, at a price and quality that makes it very competitive with the existing leaders in the field. It is extremely difficult nowadays to create a stainless steel sports watch that does not seem to borrow some of its elements from either the Royal Oak or the Nautilus, but the Tambour shows you can do it if you put your mind to it.

And it is a watch that really comes alive on the wrist. All watches do to some extent but I was unprepared for the richness of the experience of seeing the Tambour in all the varied light that downtown Manhattan has to offer. There was every chance of a watch like this, which is as much a move in strategic marketing repositioning as it is a design object, to come out feeling like a death-by-committee aggregate of timid, risk-averse design decisions but instead, what we have, and from the largest international luxury corporation in the world to boot, is a distinctly different, and distinctly beautiful timepiece, with real dignity and an identity all it’s own.

What were the odds? Apparently, not zero.

Check out our introducing story on the Tambour from earlier this year, and find out more about it at LouisVuitton.com.