LOUIS VUITTON Escale

Back in 2011, Louis Vuitton acquired the La Fabrique du Temps manufacture and began working in earnest on inventive complications. Last year we saw the Tambour Twin Chrono and today Vuitton presented a new worldtimer featuring an inventive display and a hand-painted dial inspired by vintage trunk monograms. The Escale Worldtime is a bright and colorful take on the classic travel watch. Here’s a hands-on look at this new complication as well as all the official details.

The LOUIS VUITTON Escale Worldtime starts with a brand new case shape that really impressed me. It’s slim and well finished with lugs that reference the brackets found on the corners of Louis Vuitton trunks without looking over-the-top at all. It’s 41mm across with no bezel and at only 9.75mm thick it is extremely sleek and fits nicely under a cuff. I found it very comfortable on the wrist and hope to see Vuitton embrace this new case more in the future. The white gold provided a little heft, but the dimensions kept it light enough to not be a bother.

There is also a brand new caliber at the heart of the Escale Worldtime. The caliber LV 106 is a true automatic worldtimer with a 38-hour power reserve. You can see the rotor spinning at the edges of the case back and on the dial side you can tell the time in 24 timezones at once. The display however is quite unusual. There is a yellow arrow pointing to 12 o’clock. To set the Escale Worldtime, you use the crown to line up your home city with this arrow and then you set local time using the concentric hour and minute discs. The yellow arrow will then always point to local time. The time in other cities can be read by lining up the city with the corresponding hour on the 24-hour ring around the outer part of the dial.

The dial itself is comprised of a series of rings integrated into the movement. These rings are hand-painted with the names of the cities and corresponding emblems inspired by the monograms used on vintage Louis Vuitton trunks. There are 38 colors used on the dial and it takes over 50 hours for an artisan to hand-paint and fire the various rings. The Louis Vuitton logo and the yellow arrow are actually applied to the underside of the sapphire crystal and they sit suspended over the dial rings.

LOUIS VUITTON Escale Worldtimers are often a little difficult to read, but there is no denying the romance they conjure up. The dial here is certainly busy, but it’s beautiful and in natural light the colors really stand out.