Welcome to Dialed In, Esquire’s column bringing you horological happenings and the most essential news from the watch world.
It’s a given that the luxury and the contemporary-art worlds make for compelling bedfellows, especially since high fashion and street style first merged a decade ago. That tipping point unleashed a horde of imaginary characters from underground culture into the field of fashion—and it wasn’t long before high-end watchmaking got in on the game, too.
U.S. artist Kaws (real name Brian Donnelly) has featured his “Companion” character in numerous collaborations with streetwear and fashion brands alike. With its odd name and x’ed-out eyes, Companion is paradoxically both appealing and vaguely threatening, which makes it rich meat for street fashion. Here, however, Kaws wanders into lofty—and expensive—new territory with Audemars Piguet to create the Royal Oak Concept Tourbillon “Companion.”
A closeup of the new watch.
Made in titanium, the 43mm watch is limited to 250 pieces and priced at 200,000 Swiss francs (approximately $225,000). The monochrome vibe is given depth through varying amounts of polishing and sandblasting of the surfaces and bevels. It is powered by a new, hand-wound, peripheral hour and minute caliber 2979 movement.
AP has been down this particular road with concept watches before, but those largely meant featuring pop-culture fixtures like Black Panther (2021) and Spider-Man (2023), both stemming from the brand’s partnership with the Marvel universe. Conventional, yes. Accessible? Not so much. Those watches were tourbillons, too, which priced them stratospherically out of the range of your average Marvel fan. Which is probably the point. The new “Companion” watch is an update to the angular geometry of those predecessors, but as with the choice of character, it represents a very notable departure.
Kaws himself wearing the watch.
Both the Black Panther and Spider-Man watches featured noticeable representations of the characters under the sapphire crystal, but these tended to compete visually with the functional purpose of the watch. From a design sense, at best it was a draw. For this new edition, however, Kaws and AP arrived at a design solution in which time takes a backseat. Here, a 3D Companion boldly occupies the lion’s share of the display, its signature gloves pawing at the underside of the crystal. Apart from the tourbillon itself, the time-telling functionality is banished to the edge of the case, where two triangle shapes circle the chapter ring to indicate the hours and minutes.
Eye-catching is a bit of an understatement when it comes to this watch. While collabs in general in the watch world tend to raise eyebrows just as often as they raise heart rates, this, regardless of your disposable income, is one for the ages.
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