INVEST

Ralph Lauren American Western watch collection

“I have always been inspired by the rugged beauty and romance of the American west,” Ralph Lauren once remarked, and the designer’s emotional affiliation to that part of the world has more than influenced his work over the decades. Now, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his empire’s existence, Lauren has blended his regard for aesthetics from the other side of the Mississippi with fine Swiss watchmaking tradition.

Capturing the artistic essence of the vintage rodeo and concho belts Lauren often wears himself, not to mention the Wild West flavours of much of his output since the eighties, this range of timepieces includes pocket-watches and cushion models fashioned from antiqued sterling silver, antiqued 18ct rose-gold, and burnished vachetta leather. The fine workmanship found with every component is attributable to Lauren’s having cherry-picked the finest master artisans for each one: the leather straps are hand-tooled in Texas then burnished in Italy; cases and buckles are hand-engraved and aged in New York; the movements found within are from (no prizes here) Switzerland.

The piece you see before you has had its most conspicuous Wild West aesthetics intricately engraved on a sterling silver frame that takes the case up to 42mm by 10.6mm, and is powered, like the rest of the collection, by a 189-component calibre RL514 mechanical movement, made by Piaget, that packs 40 hours of power reserve. The dial, seen through a gentle convex dome of sapphire crystal, is off-white, lacquered and polished, embroidered with a mixture of Roman and Arabic numerals and straddled by Breguet-style hands in shiny, oxidised black.

This being the age of individualism — in the sense of luxe personalisation, rather than the existential philosophy espoused by this issue’s Rake Incarnate — there is significant extra appeal in the fact that each piece has subtle differences, in terms of factors such as the weight of the engraving