Images supplied by Louis Vuitton

“I STARTED collecting watches when I was 15,” says Jean Arnault, the youngest son of Bernard Arnault, the man who owns and operates LVMH, the most powerful luxury conglomerate in the world. “My dad gave me an all-black TAG Heuer Golf watch [since discontinued] for my birthday and I wore it every single day, so much so that the logo became embedded into my wrist.”

Eight years later, in 2021 – following stints at the TAG Heuer Research Institute, McLaren Racing and Morgan Stanley – 23-year-old Arnault joined Louis Vuitton watches as watch marketing and development director. He was ultimately appointed the brand’s director of watches in 2022, which saw the former mechanical-engineering student (Arnault Jr. holds degrees from MIT and Imperial College London) propelled into the white-hot centre of the luxury-watchmaking universe.

“I always knew I wanted to work in watches, or at least I knew it was my passion,” Arnault tells me over Zoom. It’s a warm day and we’re both about to escape on our summer holidays. He’s chatty and charming. “I had the opportunity to visit a few of the manufacturing workshops when I finished university. I didn’t know anything about Louis Vuitton watches at that point, but I quickly became fascinated with the project and thought, OK, there’s something to do here.”

When Arnault began his tenure – following his four siblings Antoine, Delphine, Alexandre and Frédéric into the family business – the watches branch of Louis Vuitton was a spindly addition to the label’s main trunk. The timepieces produced were of a high quality, naturally, but they were also positioned firmly in the fashion-watch space: elegant exercises in brand extension, rather than serious pieces of horological kit. Arnault made it his mission to change all that.

“Before I started at Louis Vuitton watches, we called ourselves a manufacturer, but we weren’t really a manufacturer. So, four months in, I decided to shift the brand’s strategy,” Arnault explains. “We decided to go from making watches that were assembled with bought-in movements, to producing watches that were 85 per cent made by us.”

Under Arnault’s aegis, Louis Vuitton’s watchmaking workshop became almost fully verticalised to ensure the requisite level of quality. “When I started, I showed the watchmakers pieces from small manufacturers in my own collection and asked them to disassemble them, in order to demonstrate the level of quality I expected,” he explains. “It was a huge pivot, not least when you consider the amount by which we had to increase our prices.”

Louis Vuitton launched its first Tambour wristwatch in 2002, which housed a quartz movement and was priced around the same as an LV holdall costs today. Now, a Tambour mechanical wristwatch with an integrated-steel bracelet will set you back $34,500. There are a few more accessibly priced pieces, such as the Tambour Street Diver, which comes in at about $11,935, but overall, prices are high – higher than most fashion-branded watches in the market – and the quality of the product has been elevated to match.

When Arnault presented the new-look Tambour in 2023, he concurrently retired some 130 watch lines produced by Louis Vuitton, choosing to focus instead on two distinct categories – the sporty Tambour and the dressy Escale – exclusively populating each with ultra-fine watches. At the time of writing, the most expensive piece available on Louis Vuitton’s website is the mechanically marvellous Tambour Taiko Spin Time Air Flying Tourbillon in white gold, coming in at a cool $315,000.

The result is that Louis Vuitton is now considered a serious contender in the increasingly competitive fine-watch market – yet for Arnault, the ultimate goal is as ideological as it is commercial.

“We work around five years ahead at Louis Vuitton watches,” says Arnault. “We’re currently wrapping up 2030. I’m not here to triple revenues or triple quantities. We’re in a very small building at Louis Vuitton, and to increase our revenues we’d have to move out and hire more watchmakers. We have a set number of watches we create, and we keep it small.”

Instead, Arnault’s measure of success is more intangible. “My metric is knowing that collectors who appreciate high watchmaking are actively seeking out and buying Louis Vuitton watches. I don’t care if they buy new or vintage watches. What’s important to me is that they care about LV watchmaking, that they’ve researched it and that they appreciate it.”

Which is all well and good within the sleepy canton of Geneva, but intangible metrics are famously not the preferred yardsticks in the polished Parisian halls of LVMH – where a healthy balance sheet is prized as highly as a bolt of the finest vicuña. When I put this to Arnault, he holds firm. “For me, it’s important that Louis Vuitton watches remain a niche thing,” he explains. “We make money, we’re very happy with it, but it’s not metric number one.”

Anecdotally, Arnault is meeting his self-set targets, with serious collectors buying Louis Vuitton pieces with the same fervour as those from pure watch brands. “Today, our collectors pride themselves on buying a Louis Vuitton watch because most of their collector friends ask, ‘Why the hell would you buy that watch?’ And then they proudly take it off their wrist and show the finishing here and the details there. It brings me joy, as everybody has a high-end watch nowadays – and thinks that they’re extremely astute about watchmaking – but the guys who really know go out and buy our pieces.”

Notoriously tricky-to-impress members of the watch press are beginning to take notice, too. “Watchmaking chez Louis Vuitton has changed beyond recognition thanks to Jean Arnault,” says Esquire’s contributing watches and jewellery editor Nick Foulkes. “Since arriving four years ago, [Arnault] has transformed Louis Vuitton watches into a watch brand that collectors take seriously. It develops its own movements. It makes fewer watches of a higher quality (and, of course, a higher price). Designs are immeasurably better – at least to my taste – and Arnault has surfed the trend for métiers d’art admirably.”

In 2011, Louis Vuitton acquired La Fabrique du Temps, the facility founded by visionary master watchmakers Michel Navas and Enrico Barbasini in Meyrin, Switzerland, which was responsible for making Daniel Roth and Gerald Genta timepieces. The acquisition of the manufacture, now named La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton, revved up Louis Vuitton’s watchmaking capability. Divided between La Fabrique des Boîtiers, La Fabrique des Cadrans, and La Fabrique des Mouvements, La Fabrique du Temps combines traditional techniques such as engraving, guilloché, enamelling and miniature painting, with cutting-edge technology.

This wealth of skill and savoir-faire has allowed Jean Arnault to live out his dream of transforming Louis Vuitton watches into a proper horological player. La Fabrique de Temps has also enabled him to breathe life back into both Roth and Genta, two highly respected watch brands that wielded great influence during the 20th century.

In 2024 Arnault launched the Louis Vuitton Watch Prize for Independent Creatives, which awarded independent Spanish watchmaker Raùl Pagès a year of mentorship from La Fabrique du Temps, plus a financial sum. Pagès was chosen for his elegantly minimal Régulateur à détente RP1, which features a pivoted detent escapement – a notoriously fiddly piece of horological engineering used in ultra-precision watchmaking.

Moreover, in 2023, Arnault orchestrated a widely praised collaboration between Louis Vuitton and the watchmaker Rexhep Rexhepi’s Atelier Akrivia. Earlier this year, he joined forces with the Finnish master watchmaker Kari Voutilainen – widely hailed as one of the greatest in the world today – to create the LVKV-02 GMR 6 – a one-of-a-kind, hand-finished timepiece whose dial alone required 32 hours of meticulous handcrafting. The watch comes housed inside a hand-painted Louis Vuitton trunk.

All this to say, Arnault really wants his new customers to know that he takes watchmaking as seriously as they do.

“The LV watch customer has changed a bit. We’ve been targeting pure player watch-brand connoisseurs who already have Rolexes and TAG Heuers in their collection, and then they add a Louis Vuitton watch to that,” he explains. “My main challenge now is getting people to know that LV makes watches at all,” he says. “I’d be curious to find out how many people who know the brand are even aware that we make watches. I think it’s probably in the low percentiles.”

What strikes me about Arnault’s role is the unique creative freedom it affords – freedom he likely wouldn’t have at a brand focused solely on watchmaking. With Louis Vuitton’s core business rooted in fashion and luggage, there’s space to experiment, to push boundaries. In a traditional watch house, his creative license would face tighter guardrails. Would he ever consider taking the helm of a dedicated watch brand?

“Because I wouldn’t have the same freedom… no,” he says. “I can’t say for sure, because I haven’t done it before. But take Daniel Roth – a pure watch brand – as an example. If I decided to make an integrated-steel sports watch with Daniel Roth, I’d immediately destroy the brand. That would make no sense. I wouldn’t have the freedom to do that. With a pure watch brand, I’d need to be much more cautious. One radical move could risk shutting the whole thing down.”

It’s no secret the luxury industry is struggling to stay in step with contemporary consumers. Prices are soaring, while concerns around quality and provenance continue to grow – and LVMH hasn’t been spared. The group reported a 22 per cent drop in net profit in the first half of 2025. Shoppers are demanding more for less, moving away from logo-heavy products toward pieces where craftsmanship takes centre-stage. In Arnault’s opinion, smart storytelling is the best way for Louis Vuitton watches to weather the storm.

“It’s true, there is a crisis of luxury, but it’s not because the savoir-faire is not there,” he says. “It’s just because we’ve not been very good at telling the stories and spotlighting the people that make the product. The first thing I did when I arrived at Louis Vuitton watches was to implement a very simple rule: one watchmaker takes care of one watch from start to finish.”

A more existential question looms: what is the relevance of wristwatches in an era dominated by AI, smartphones and ever-smarter health-tracking wearables?

“Watches are timeless,” he says. “Watches are meant to be kept across generations. And they’re meant to be made to last for generations. I find absolutely no thrill in having this in my pocket every day.” He gestures at his phone. “Quite the contrary.”

Speaking to Arnault about watches is an enjoyable experience. There’s a twinkle in his eye, visible even through the flattening format of Zoom, and he’s clearly passionate about the task at hand.

“I’m essentially an eight-year-old kid in a grown-up body,” Arnault says, laughing. “I love planes, cars and watches. I don’t collect the first two, but I do collect watches – as they’re more practical to keep and store, and much less expensive. I’m fascinated by anything mechanical.”

Sometimes in business, you have to be very mathematical, but you have to be very human, too.

Related:

IWC unveils the all-black Portugieser Chronograph Ceratanium – first worn by Ed Sheeran

The best watches at the 2026 BAFTAs

Jeremy Allen White wore the new Louis Vuitton Tambour to the US Open