Welcome to Watches of the Week, where we’ll track the rarest, wildest, and most covetable watches spotted on celebrities.
There’s the point in every great superhero’s character arc when things start to go off the rails. They’ve lost a battle and their confidence in the face of a seemingly insurmountable foe. They get all sad and mopey. Then they go back to the lab, train, and Eat Pray Love until unlocking some new, more-powerful power. Last night, at the London screening of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, star Simu Liu came through with a new, mortal power: a stunning watch.
Up to this point, we haven’t seen Liu, who plays the titular Shang-Chi, wearing many watches—and the ones we have seen, have mostly been quartz pieces. Which (no shade!) aren’t as expensive or technically impressive as their mechanical counterparts. They are certainly not as impressive as this 18-carat gold IWC Portugieser. The watch’s numerals and hands are made out of the precious metal, too, and the strap is alligator leather.
Liu’s character in Shang-Chi is on a dangerous quest to harness the power of the 10 rings, but in real life he seems pretty content with the one watch. Look at that shaka!
Cena appears to be wearing one of the watches Rolex reworked for 2021. In typical Rolex fashion, the brand didn’t mess with the Explorer’s success—the switch to sleek matte black on the hands and hour markers is maybe the most noticeable new touch. Still, the Explorer remains a tough sports watch, originally designed for spelunking but now a red-carpet-ready accessory. Not so different a career pivot from Cena, who jumped from wrestling to the acting A-list in short order.
Average buds buy each other a bottle of booze for their birthdays. But James Harden and Russell Westbrook aren’t average buds, at least income-wise. So Russ celebrated Harden’s 32nd birthday by giving his brother in Big Fits a bit of flash in the form of a Richard Mille RM-011. It’s a little bit of karmic return for Harden: he’s long been giving other pals Richard Mille watches on their birthdays.
You can’t blame Gianlugi Donnarumma for wanting to make a strong first impression when being introduced to fans of his new team, Paris Saint-Germain. The PSG keeper wore a radical GMT-Master II that uses different colored sapphires for its two-tone bezel. In 2007, Rolex overhauled the GMT-Master and added modern touches, like a ceramic dial and green 24-hour hands. As part of that rehaul, a few top-of-the-line versions of the GMT trickled out, including this one on Donnarumma’s wrist.
Few rappers have really dialed in their personal style like YG. He routinely wears itty-bitty cat-eye sunglasses, Dickies, red bandanas, and hard-bottom shoes. Typically paired with his singular look? Almost always a variation of a gold Day-Date. Sometimes the watch is iced-out or comes with a crimson dial. But recently, while out in Los Angeles, he kept it extremely classic with this gold-on-gold-on-gold variation of the Day-Date.
