Welcome to Watches of the Week, where we’ll track the rarest, wildest, and most covetable watches spotted on celebrities.
Lil Baby is a prime example of why it’s so important to have great friends. The reason, of course, is the presents! Last year, for Lil Baby’s birthday, the Brooklyn Nets’ one-hammy hero James Harden gave the rapper a heck of a gift: a “honeybun” (slang for $100,000) inside a Prada bag…along with a Richard Mille RM 030. Drake, meanwhile, doesn’t even need a birthday to give his buddy a nice gift: a custom Rolex Day-Date outfitted with a Chrome Hearts bracelet.
Lil Baby posted an image of the watch to Instagram with a thank you for Drake. Since Lil Baby’s birthday won’t come until the end of the year, it’s not entirely clear what the gift is for. The educated guess is that it’s a gift celebrating The Voice of the Heroes, Lil Baby’s latest album with Lil Durk, debuting at number one. Either way, no matter what Lil Baby-related occasion they’re celebrating, his friends are smart to get him watches. The rapper consistently wears a timepiece on each wrist, giving him ample opportunities to wear both pieces at once.
Lil Baby’s Chrome Hearts Rolex Day-Date
If anyone has the ability to get Chrome Hearts to customize a Rolex, it’s Drake. Mr. Champagne Papi recently collaborated with the brand on a full collection of clothing and a fully Chromed-out Rolls Royce. Drake also owns a Chrome-customized Rolex Day-Date himself, with a bracelet featuring flowers blooming with diamonds.
Chrome Hearts’ horological creations have been in the news recently: after Ben Affleck rekindled his romance with Jennifer Lopez, he began wearing the same Franck Muller watch (with a Chrome bracelet) that he wore in the early Bennifer days.
Ed Sheeran’s Rolex GMT-Master II
We’ve seen a lot of GMT-Master IIs in this column, but we should take a moment to appreciate Sheeran’s specific model. On the Late Late Show With James Corden, he wore a vintage version of the watch with a different look than we’re used to seeing on this model. The reason is that for decades, Rolex gave its GMTs aluminum bezel, which tend to fade over time. That’s what gives Sheeran’s watch that charmingly retro look. Rolex didn’t like that these watches faded, though, so the company replaced aluminum bezels with tougher ceramic ones in the mid-2000s. However, patina is now considered a positive among many watch enthusiasts, so there are plenty of Rolex collectors—, like Sheeran, apparently—who prefer the fading.
Drake’s Richard Mille RM 27-04
Setting Lil Baby up with a new piece didn’t prevent Drake from getting a new watch himself. His newest piece is a Richard Mille RM 27-04 made for Spaniard Rafael Nadal that takes its tennis inspiration literally. The steel cable looped across the dial is meant to evoke the strings on a tennis racquet. Drake posted the watch on Instagram along with the text “RAFAAAAA.”
Roberto Mancini’s Richard Mille RM 11-04
Coaching up his Italian squad against Austria in the Euros, Roberto Mancini wore a Richard Mille made specifically for this purpose. I mean that very literally: Richard Mille made the watch specifically for Mancini, including a function designed to time out the halves of a soccer match, as well as extra time, which the coach needed in the matchup against Austria. Aesthetically, the vibrant blue matches the jerseys worn by the team known as the Azzurri.
Jeremy O. Harris’s Cartier Tank Louis
Big week for Jeremy O. Harris: he’s rolling out Zola (the movie he helped adapt froman epic Twitter thread), and he wore a very nice outfit at the film’s LA premiere. He also managed to fit a trip to Disneyland in there. And like the drop on Splash Mountain, Harris knows how to go big before returning to calmer waters. The unconventionally shaggy forearms of his suit give way to the classic Cartier Tank Louis in yellow gold. O’Harris joins the lineage of auteurs and writers, like Truman Capote and Andy Warhol, who have gravitated to the Tank over history.