‘Louis Cruises With Kari’ With The LVKV-02 GMR 6 Voutilainen X Louis Vuitton
The collaboration between Louis Vuitton Watches and Kari Voutilainen is a no-holds-barred exercise in exceptional watchmaking.
An interesting and occasionally also enlightening exercise, is to ask yourself what it would take for a watch to be really, truly exceptional – for it to be something that is not only functionally irreproachable, but which also manages to express in every aspect, an orientation on the part of its maker or makers towards producing something which not only satisfies all the basic elements of technical and aesthetic excellence in the expression of craft, but which visibly seeks to break new ground as well. There are of course an almost limitless number of possibilities that can exist within the confines of this rather general brief, but I think that one way to frame it would be that a genuinely exceptional watch shows thought and care in its choice of materials; that it should – in fact it must – represent at the highest possible level, the hand finishing techniques which have always distinguished really fine watchmaking; and that it should not only be functionally irreproachable, but also, on some level, demonstrate a willingness and ability to innovate technically without sacrificing craft.
Finally – and this is maybe the most difficult thing to achieve – it should on some level, surprise; that is to say, it should be something which manages to achieve a combination of all the aforementioned prerequisites but in a way which could not have been easily foreseen or predicted. All these requirements taken together rule out many, maybe most, watches and in particular, achieving the element of surprise without obviously lapsing into mere novelty for its own sake is extraordinarily difficult. Even some watches which in every other respect are extremely distinguished, can fail the test of expression of imagination.
This preamble brings us to what I think is one of the most genuinely exceptional watches I’ve ever seen, which is the just-announced collaboration between Louis Vuitton, and one of the best known and most influential of independent watchmakers: Kari Voutilainen. Voutilainen is one of those rare watchmakers whose breadth of talents covers just about every aspect of watchmaking imaginable; he’s fascinated by basic problems in precision but also shows a complete grasp of complicated watchmaking as well, and has also developed a genuinely original design vocabulary. His watches are, across the board, representative of classic fine watch movement finishing at the highest possible level, and on top of everything else he is as far as I can tell, an extremely shrewd and careful businessperson which as anyone who has some knowledge of the history of independent watchmaking, is not exactly a common talent; usually, watchmakers are challenged to keep their companies, small as they usually are, economically viable (although we celebrate many of them for persisting in adversity, there is probably something to be said for not putting yourself in a position to struggle with adversity in the first place).
The new watch from Kari Voutilainen and Louis Vuitton is the second of LV’s collaborations with an high profile independent; the first was of course, a collaboration with Rexhep Rexhepi, the Akrivia X Louis Vuitton LVRR-01 Chronographe à Sonnerie, which debuted in 2023. That watch was a showcase for both the technical and craft skills of LV and Rexhepi; it is a central chronograph with five minute tourbillon and hour strike, with Louis Vuitton contributing, in addition to technical resources and collaboration on the design brief, a smoked sapphire dial with plique-à-jour enamel inserts. The new watch, the LVKV-02 GMR 6, is a GMT or two time-zone watch, based on the Voutilainen GMT 6, in which home time is shown on a 24 hour subdial, with an hour hand that can be set in one-hour increments via the crown, which acts as a pusher as well; the GMT 6 as well as the LVKV-02 GMR 6 use Kari Voutilainen’s version of Breguet’s double escape wheel, “natural escapement” or échappement naturel.
The Case
The case uses the design of the Tambour family, which was introduced in 2024 in both as three-hand dress watch, and in the métiers d’art “Cabinet Of Wonders” watches.
The phrase, “Louis Cruises With … ” is the name LV’s given to its collaborations with independent watchmakers; “cruise” in this sense not only refers to the collaboration but also to Louis Vuitton’s history as a maker of luggage, and especially, the hand-made steamer trunks which made the company famous. “Escale” is likewise a reference to Louis Vuitton’s history as a purveyor of traveller’s necessaries; the word means “stopover” but it can also mean “port of call.” The lugs of the Escale cases are a subtle echo of the design of the brackets on LV trunks and they connect the dots between the watches and the luggage very neatly, without hitting you over the head with it. The name, LVKV-02 GMR 6, refers to the two collaborators, Louis Vuitton and Kari Voutilainen, and GM is for the GMT complication; R refers to the power reserve.
The case of the LVKV-02 GMR 6 has a case middle made of brushed tantalum – Jean Arnault, the head of Louis Vuitton watches as well as Gérald Genta and Daniel Roth, has been seen wearing a unique piece tantalum Escale and of course, Voutilainen has used tantalum as a case material in the past as well (for instance, in a 10 piece limited edition of the Vingt-8) so the material, which is equally famous for its toughness and the extreme difficulty involved in machining it, is a natural choice for a collaboration. All the other case components, including the bezel, caseback, lugs, and buckle, are made from platinum (the other most difficult to machine case metal) and the contrast between the pale, astral glow of platinum and the distinctive greyish sheen of tantalum makes for a subtle but noticeable contrast. The tantalum case middle has a very fine brushed finish, done by hand, which takes about four hours to apply.
The Dial: Guilloché Patterns And Miniature Painting
It’s not too much to say that the dial alone is a miniature work of art in its own right.
The dial is manufactured in four parts; the guilloché is applied on rose engines at La Fabrique du Temps, Louis Vuitton’s design and manufacturing studio in Geneva. The rose engines are antiques, as most rose engines in use in the watch industry are (although in recent years, a few artisans have begun making them again) and the pattern, says Louis Vuitton, is based on the thread pattern of the famous LV “Damier” checkerboard motif (in this case, given a curvature rather than the squared-off classic Damier pattern, which better integrates with the curves of the case and dial).
While the checkerboard pattern of the Damier motif is less visible when you look at the dial straight on, it appears much more clearly when the light hits the dial at an angle.
It is worth mentioning that not all guilloché is created equal; it’s become common in mass produced watches, and even mass produced luxury watches, to use stamping rather than the slow and painstaking processes necessary to produce guilloché by hand, in which the pressure of the cutting head against the workpiece, as well as the speed at which the workpiece rotates in the lathe, are controlled by hand.
The dial is painted by hand as well – Louis Vuitton uses a cold enamel material for both the colorful geometric patterns on the hour track, as well as the two areas of gradient color on the 24 hour disk’s day and night sectors. A similar motif has been used by LV in the past, for the Escale World Time, World Time Repeater, and Escale Time Zone watches. These patterns don’t exactly correspond to anything in particular but they are reminiscent of everything from national flags, to the international maritime signal flags whose design was codified in its modern form beginning in the mid-19th century (in fact, the design of the flags was established by the British Board of Trade in 1855, which is just one year after Louis Vuitton became an official label in 1854, if you are interested in historic coincidences).
There are a total of 24 different colors used and it takes about 32 hours to complete one dial. I couldn’t do it in thirty two hundred hours and I can say that because I have tried; if you go to La Fabrique du Temps you can try your hand at filling in the color spaces on an Escale dial.
You work with a brush made of a single squirrel hair (I have been unable to find out what happens to the rest of the squirrel but presumably they are running happy and free in the woodlands around Geneva, blissfully unaware that they’re short one tail hair). The recesses are tiny and controlling the amount of paint applied, as well as getting it to fill the recess without overflowing, is an exercise that would tax the patient of a saint; I tried using some red paint and under the binocular microscope provided my attempt resembled nothing so much as a miniature crime scene. The precisely controlled gradients in the 24 hour dial are equally challenging to execute. If you look closely, by the way, you’ll see that the stars are tiny versions of the stars seen in the Louis Vuitton monogram pattern.
The Movement: Caliber GMR-6
Mechanically, this is the same caliber Voutilainen uses in the GMT 6, but with some extra flourishes to carry over the design of the dial.
This is one of the most technically interesting movements anyone’s making today and the star of the show (at least, for escapement nerds – you know who you are) is the escapement. Rather than the ubiquitous lever escapement, Voutilainen elected to use a reworked version of Breguet’s so called “natural escapement.” The word “natural” here refers to what watchmakers call “natural lift.” The lever escapement applies energy to the balance through a lever impulsed by sliding friction on the escape wheel teeth. The natural escapement, on the other hand, uses two escape wheels, which sit side by side and are positioned so that their teeth can give radial, rather than sliding impulse; and moreover they do so directly rather than relying on a lever as an intermediary.
In the image above, you can see the two escape wheels sitting just below the balance spring. The theoretical advantages to the natural escapement are twofold – first, it’s more efficient (30% more efficient, in this case) as there’s no lever, and secondly, as with the chronometer detent escapement, direct radial impulse means that there is no need for oil on the impulse surfaces, which gives you better long term rate stability.
Breguet, despite the inherent advantages of the design, never got it to work to his satisfaction. In his design, one of the escape wheels is driven by the going train, but the second is driven by the first escape wheel and the asymmetry in energy resulted in uneven impulse at the balance. The other problem was that to get the two escape wheels to operate precisely, the tolerances between the driving and driven escape wheel gears had to be very close, but making them close enough to ensure precise action produced too much friction at the meshing of the gear teeth, resulting in lost energy and worsening the problem of uneven impulse. George Daniels got around the problem in his Space Traveler 1 pocket watch by using two mainspring barrels with an independent gear train for each escape wheel, but this is a solution requiring a lot of extra space in the movement, which is fine for a pocket watch but less so for a wristwatch, especially as it reduces the room available for the balance.
Voutilainen’s version uses the high precision possible with modern CNC machines to make a version of the natural escapement which largely fulfills the promise of Breguet’s original inventions. There is still a driving and driven escape wheel but both the precise machining of the two intermediate gears connecting them, as well as the low inertia of the two escape wheels, makes it a fully functional escapement. The two intermediate gears are actually hidden under the movement plate, so the escape wheels look as if they’re turning without any connection to the rest of the mechanism.
Amazingly enough, the escape wheels are made without recourse to things like LIGA fabrication or silicon; it was a goal of Voutilainen’s to as much as possible, not rely on outside suppliers or more exotic fabrication techniques (echoing the general theme of self-sufficiency found throughout his businesses). The escape wheels are made of good old steel; and they are heat blued by hand using techniques Breguet would have recognized immediately.
The balance is exceptionally large, at 13.6mm (the movement overall is a classic 30mm in diameter) with a mathematically correct Phillips overcoil terminal curve and a Grossmann inner terminal curve, both of which keep the center of gravity of the spring concentric with its center of rotation, a requirement for isochronism. The large balance and spring are non-standard components, and they are brought to time the old-fashioned way – by “vibrating” the balance and spring above a reference balance known to have the correct frequency (in this case, 18,000 vph) and adjusting the length of the balance spring until the two balances are beating in sync with each other.
The movement is in German silver (maillechort) which is a nickel-zinc alloy used in high end watchmaking prior to the development of rhodium plated brass. Hand finishing to a very high level is something for which Voutilainen is famous and the LVKV-02 GMR 6 is no exception. Screws are black polished with chamfered heads and polished slots; Geneva stripes and perlage are applied by hand, using rotating abrasive disks; anglage is applied by hand to the movement bridges and all steel work, including the balance bridge, is polished by hand, with edges chamfered and polished as well.
The rachet wheel, which fits onto the arbor of the mainspring barrel and which is wound from the crown via the crown wheel, is decorated with a colored geometric pattern echoing the miniature painting found on the dial.
An Exceptional Example Of No Holds Barred Luxury
It’s probably fairly obvious at this point that I absolutely think this is an exceptional watch, in the terms laid out at the outset. It fulfills all the criteria; it is an example of craft in watchmaking that can stand against anything else in the world, from anywhere else in the world, at any time in the history of watchmaking. It is technically distinctive and has a unique solution to the problems which beset one of Breguet’s most interesting, but also most functionally problematic, escapement designs, and does so moreover using only classic watchmaking methods and materials. It shows care and thought in choice of materials throughout, including the combination of two of casemaking’s most challenging metals, in the case of the watch.
Moreover, it is genuinely surprising, but in a way that doesn’t rely on anything as juvenile as striving for novelty or attempting to shock. To anyone who objects that such bold decorative motifs are uncharacteristic of Voutilainen’s other work, I can only suggest looking at Voutilainen’s other work; there are certainly examples of relatively austere designs which express primarily functional excellence but there are also any number of bold, colorful, and even some almost shockingly colorful piece, alongside which the LVKV-02 GMR 6 fits very well. It is expensive, mais oui – €550,000, and I am not going to undertake the Quixotic task of trying to find a one to one correspondence between the intrinsic labor, materials cost, and ingenuity in a luxury watch, and its market price. It is I think true, though, that in the rarefied world of very, very high end watch making and collecting, finding a watch like the LVKV-02 GMR 6, which indisputably overdelivers on every aspect of craft and real watchmaking value, is rarer than it should be. On top of all that, the miniature travel trunk it comes in is absolutely delicious.
Watches from Louis Vuitton have for several years now, outdone just about anything else I can think of in fine watchmaking in terms of sheer daring and real watchmaking content combined, and the LVKV-02 GMR 6 is as fine an example as I can think of, of both a really in-depth collaboration, and the old, timeworn but ever-true adage that real luxury takes as long as it takes, and costs whatever it costs.
The Louis Vuitton X Kari Voutilainen, “Lous Cruises With Kari” LVKV-02 GMR 6: case, Escale, 52 components, 40.5mm x 12.54mm, water resistance 30M, with tantalum case middle and platinum caseback, bezel, lugs, and buckle. Dial, hand-guilloché decorated white gold with miniature painting done at La Fabrique du Temps; second time zone disc in 24K gold; hands, gold and heat blued steel. Movement, cal. GMR 6, with double escape wheels and “natural” escapement; 254 components running at 18,000 vph in 32 jewels; balance spring with outer Phillips and inner Grossmann terminal curves; white gold ratchet wheel with miniature painting. Monogram Eclipse watch trunk, hand painted. Limited edition of 5 pieces, price, €550,000. A portion of proceeds from the sale support the Louis Vuitton Prize For Independent Creatives. See Louis Vuitton’s watch collections at LouisVuitton.com.