Louis Vuitton may be more well-known for its high fashion than its high horology, but it has been designing and debuting ambitious timepieces with impressive frequency for over a decade. Ever since the maison’s 2011 acquisition of La Fabrique du Temps—the facility founded by veteran watchmakers Enrico Barbasini and Michel Navas—it has maintained a dizzying pace of innovation, creating complicated masterworks from minute repeaters to automatons, some of which have claimed prestigious awards at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève. But Louis Vuitton is by no means new to watchmaking; in fact, it has been producing timepieces since the late 1980s. In partnership with Italian designer and architect Gae Aulenti—who transformed Paris’s Gare d’Orsay train station into the Musée d’Orsay—it released the LV I and LV II in 1988. These references were standouts in several respects: Their pebble-like, lugless cases with a 12 o’clock crown were reminiscent of vintage pocket watches, while their..
