Louis Vuitton Is Bringing Back Its Most Coveted ’80s-Era Watch

As one of the most famous and tasteful watch collectors on the planet, Tyler, the Creator has an ability to move the market like few others. Case in point: After the rapper-slash-designer—whose wristwear lineup includes everything from rare Cartiers to $23 Casios—stepped out wearing the Louis Vuitton Monterey II in 2023, the largely forgotten ’80s watch soon went from generally selling for a few hundred dollars on the secondary market to often moving for upwards of $8,000 at auction. Now, the hype surrounding that model has led Louis Vuitton to actually revive the Monterey line, with a redesigned spin on the Parisian house’s original 1988 watch.

Let’s take a step back in time for a moment. While Louis Vuitton has more recently turned itself into a serious player in the watch world—crafting complicated in-house wares and aligning itself with industry darlings like Rexhep Rexhepi—up until the 1980s, the age-old luxury giant had somehow never released a timepiece. That all changed in 1988 with the release of the Monterey, designed by the seminal Italian designer Gae Aulenti, the same woman responsible for the conversion of Paris’s Gare d’Orsay into the Musée d’Orsay.