Introducing The Louis Vuitton x Kari Voutilainen LVKV-02 GMR 6 (Live Pics, Pricing)

It's been a year and a half since the introduction of the Louis Vuitton x Rexhep Rexhepi LVRR-01 Chronographe à Sonnerie that kicked off this series. In January, I said that this year's LVMH watch week was when the revamped Louis Vuitton really hit its stride as a serious brand in high horology. But La Fabrique du Temps (LFdT) has been executing horology at the very high end for a while now, from their complicated automaton watches to the collaboration with Rexhepi.

The LVRR-01 Chronographe à Sonnerie was an extreme multi-hyphenate. Limited to ten pieces and priced at CHF 450,000, it was a semi-skeletonized, dual-sided, tourbillon-regulated sonnerie au passage des minutes du chronographe (if my terrible French is correct) – a chronograph that chimed out the passing of each minute while the chronograph ran – powered by twin barrels in a 39.5mm by 11.9mm Jean-Pierre Hagmann-designed Tambour-inspired case. The front side featured a smoked sapphire drawing inspiration from the brand's Spin Time models, while the rear showed the chronograph functions with a more traditional display.

While the concept for today's launch has remained the same – highlight the best of a legendary watchmaker's skills – a lot has changed at Louis Vuitton La Fabrique du Temps in the last year and a half. The relaunched Daniel Roth and Gerald Genta brands are fully off the ground. The Tambour has become a fully-fledged line of watches in steel, precious metals, and ceramic, with sub-categories like the Tambour Convergence and the uber-complicated Tambour Taiko Spin Time. Louis Vuitton's watch department makes up such a small fraction of the brand's overall revenue that Jean Arnault has felt empowered to take risks and make bold moves.

This time, the move is with Kari Voutilainen, a watchmaker whom I admire not only for his timepieces but also for his business acumen and kind personality. He's taken being a small independent watchmaker (who still makes less than 100 watches a year) and turned it into a multi-company brand that does cases, dials, and more. Fresh off a year where he won yet another GPHG award and released a 20th-anniversary homage to his first tourbillon, it's possible that 2025 could be an even bigger year for Voutilainen. The relaunch of the beloved brand Urban Jurgensen – of which Voutilainen is Co-CEO – is slated for the middle of the year. 

Voutilainen has become known for a charmingly traditional yet masterful approach to watchmaking. His watches still feature slightly thicker plates and bridges, which allow him to secure parts using only screws (where other makers might use some adhesive), allowing him to make a watch that should be serviceable for hundreds of years. Through subsidiary Comblémine SA, his dial work has become a pillar in watchmaking, providing dials for dozens of other brands and independents. At the same time, he's eschewed dials entirely with watches like the KV20i, and the inverse/reverse concept has become another cornerstone of his brand's offerings.

I think newcomers don't realize the level to which Voutilainen is a master of complications; making one-off watches like a Minute Repeater Perpetual Calendar or a handful of the Minute Repeater GMT is what dreams are made of. When I heard that Voutilainen would be next up to collaborate with Louis Vuitton, I knew the watch couldn't be something simple. But I missed the biggest twist: the artistry.

The LVKV-02 GMR 6 is, at its core, a GMT (as the GM in the name suggests). Simple enough, sure, but not in the way Kari Voutilainen does it. The idea here is a callback to Louis Vuitton's history of making trunks for world travelers. The "R" refers to the retrograde power reserve display at 12 o'clock, while the "6" stands for the location of the 24-hour GMT display on the dial.

The GMT disc rotates once every 24 hours and is meant to be set for the wearer's "home" time, while the hour hand can be independently adjusted for the local time while traveling simply by pressing the crown (which in turn presses in the stem and mechanism for the GMT). Kari Voutilainen has made GMTs (models GMR and GMT-6) with a similar function in the past, but in these watches, the mechanism adjusted the GMT subdial instead of the hour hand, making this a new variation. That's a stark contrast from the LVRR-01 from Rexhepi, which featured an entirely new caliber. Instead, the bulk of the cost here comes from artisinal crafts from LFdT and Voutilainen. But let's look at the rest of the watch first.

Appropriate for a GMT, the watch is done in the brand's Escale case (French for "stopover") made in tantalum measuring 40.5mm by 12.54mm, with platinum for the bezel, back, lugs, crown, and buckle. Each lug alone takes about an hour to finish, using cabronnage (sandpaper sticks) to start, then polishing and sharpening. The tantalum case is satin finished by hand, taking four more hours. The caseback is engraved with the phrase "Louis cruises with Kari," which takes 12 hours to render. "Louis cruises with..." is the name of this series of projects with independents.

In addition to the functional inclusion of the crown-button GMT, the movement is as technically refined as his other pieces. As he started doing in 2011, Voutilainen used a large balance wheel and a hairspring with an external Phillips overcoil and an internal Grossman curve, which gives the same amount of tension to internal curvature as to external overcoil for maximum accuracy. The watch has two escapement wheels providing direct impulse to the balance through the jewels. This is designed to be more efficient than a Swiss lever escapement while being more stable, beating at 18,000 vph, and improving power reserve (65 hours). The mainplates and bridges are in German silver, and every single one of the 254 components of the movement is finished to the Nth degree.

The movement side (always one of my favorites on a Voutilainen) is a good segue into the dial, if for nothing else but the connection of the intricate enamel work on the front and back. The mainspring barrel features a multi-colored miniature painting by artisan Maryna Bossy of La Fabrique des Arts Louis Vuitton (La Fabrique du Temp's Métiers d'Art studio). The white gold rachet applique takes 16 hours to paint the 27 different colors, with five sessions in the kiln and eight hours of firing. 

On the front is the application of basically every one of the best skills from the two brands' dial manufacturing studios. Bossy was responsible for the miniature-painted diamond-polished hour circle. The design was inspired by ancient stained-glass windows, with 28 colors and 32 hours of painting per watch. The center of the gold dial was done in hand guilloché by Voutilainen's workshop in a nod to Louis Vuitton's "Damier" motif, done on machinery dating back to the 18th century. Voutilainen told me it took four days to achieve.

The Voutilainen workshop was also responsible for the sun and moon imagery that serves as the day/night indicator on the GMT subdial. The subdial is hand-engraved and decorated in Louis Vuitton's signature saffron and blue color scheme, with a subtle gradient that conceals  shapes of Louis Vuitton's Monogram flower. As a final "Louis Vuitton" touch, the brand has combined its LV logo with the first initial of Kari's last name on both the dial and the movement. As with the LVRR-01, each watch comes in a bespoke Louis Vuitton travel trunk, hand-painted by Louis Vuitton's artists to mirror the motifs on the dial, the number of the watch in the series, and the phrase "Louis cruises with Kari."

The LVKV-02 GMR 6 is limited to five pieces (plus two prototypes) and priced at €550,000 – more than the LVRR-01 collaboration with Rexhepi but half as many pieces. The first example of the Rexhepi collab is in final quality control checks and should start being delivered once per month for the next ten months. However, in the case of the LVKV-02, all watches have been pre-produced and are immediately available to clients. 

Kari Voutilainen is on the committee of experts for the Louis Vuitton Watch Prize for Independent Creatives. Proceeds from the collaboration will support independent watchmaking and the prize itself. The winner of last year's award was Raùl Pagès, who received a one-year mentorship from LV's La Fabrique du Temps and a financial prize. Arnault told me that the entire idea behind these collaborative efforts was to support the prize.

In some ways, I can't believe that among all my guesses – another "Masterpiece" watch or maybe a GMT Repeater inverse – I missed what, in hindsight, looks like an obvious option for collaboration. Voutilainen frequently collaborates with Japanese artist Tatsuo Kitamura for some incredible pieces that leverage enamel work for amazing results. That includes the Ji-Ku worldtimer, which won the Artistic Crafts category at the 2022 GPHG, and the Hisui, which features movement-side enameling.

For the audience members who would say, "That's a lot of money for just a pretty dial," I can't say that you're wrong. But it's worth looking at the bigger picture. When Voutilainen was asked what the process was like making a four-part, fragile, painstaking dial with two studios of artists working on a single dial, he raised his eyebrows and puffed a little air through his lips. Any time you transport or combine all the parts is a recipe for something to go wrong. The team wouldn't tell me the failure rate to get the five completed dials, and I'm not sure I'd want to know.

The watch has a level of whimsy that I think Louis Vuitton does quite well. Yes, whimsy and €550,000 don’t quite go together in most cases, but then again, those who buy the watch probably will find plenty to enjoy about it.

Jean Arnault and his team at La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton have set the bar high with the first two watches in the series. It's hard to imagine who might come next that has the star power to continue to elicit the average of $500,000 price tags between the two, but I have a handful of names in mind. Hopefully, we'll only have to wait another year or so to find out.

For more information, visit Louis Vuitton's website.