In 1988, Louis Vuitton asked Gae Aulenti — the Italian architect then transforming a Paris railway station into the Musée d’Orsay — to design a watch. Her answer, the LV II, was pure architecture for the wrist: a lug-free, pebble-smooth case with the crown perched at twelve o’clock, unlike anything else of its era. Nearly four decades on, La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton has revived her vision in a material she would have appreciated: high-tech ceramic, fired at a thousand degrees.
The new Monterey comes in two permanent-collection references, green or black ceramic, each 37mm across and a graceful 11mm tall. The green model pairs a lacquered green dial with yellow hands and a white railway track; the black version answers with a white lacquered dial, red hands and a red track — crisp, graphic combinations that honour Aulenti’s original with a contemporary wink. The steel crown at twelve carries a Clous de Paris texture, and a needle-thin blue seconds hand sweeps over it all.
Beneath the lacquer runs the calibre LFT MA01.02, an automatic developed by La Fabrique du Temps in Geneva — 174 components, an 18k rose gold rotor, and 45 hours of reserve. It is a serious movement in a watch that wears its seriousness lightly, at €23,000.
The Monterey’s return says much about where Louis Vuitton’s watchmaking now stands: confident enough to reach past the Tambour into its own archive, and to bet that a 1988 architect’s radical pebble is exactly what 2026 wants. On the evidence of these two ceramic pieces — playful, precise, and utterly unlike the crowd — the bet looks safe.
