Welcome to Watches of the Week, where we’ll track the rarest, wildest, and most covetable watches spotted on celebrities.
Some guys have all the luck, huh? Jay-Z started off his week at the Grammys palling around with folks like Kendrick Lamar, The-Dream, and LeBron James’s agent Rich Paul. Beyoncé was nice enough to bring him to the ceremony, where she was robbed—robbed!—of the big prize again, so he put on something nice. His wristwear was particularly extravagant: Jay wore the Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime 6300.
This is a hilariously, stupefyingly outrageous watch. It’s based on a 2014 extremely complex watch that Patek only ever made seven of. But the demand for the piece was so high that PP introduced Jay’s 6300 in non-limited numbers. Listing out the watch’s features is like doing an impersonation of Bill Hader’s SNL character Stefon—it. has. everything: a moonphase, perpetual calendar, day and date display, a minute repeater (which chimes out the time on demand), a power reserve (a function that shows how much longer a watch will tick before it needs to be wound again), and a Grand Sonnerie plus a Petite Sonnerie for good measure (both of which chime out the time at every hour and quarter hour). There were a lot of cool watches at the Grammys on guys like Bad Bunny, who wore a dainty vintage Audemars Piguet, and Kendrick Lamar, who you’ll read more about below. Not that it’s a competition—*but if it were!—*Jay won.
But Hov wasn’t done there. After enjoying the Grammy’s festivities, he was back at Crypto.comarena Tuesday night to watch LeBron James beat the all-time NBA scoring record. Again, he found a watch appropriate for the occasion in the Patek Philippe Tiffany Nautilus. The biggest, hype-iest watch maybe ever made, this piece dialed up Patek’s partnership with Tiffany’s—which was previously limited to the jeweler stamping its logo on the dial—to an entirely new level. What if you made the whole dial out of Tiffany’s? Now, that Tiffany blue is on everything from limited-edition Nike sneakers to Mitchell & Ness football jerseys. As collectors of this watch, and any other piece with a turquoise dial, have proven, people can’t get enough of this shade, especially when it’s on a now out-of-production Nautilus.
What watch to wear after breaking one of the NBA’s holiest and once-considered-unreachable records? For LeBron, it has to be an AP. The brand has been behind him for half of his career, starting with a collaboration on its Royal Oak Offshore in 2013. Like James—who grew as a shooter, fadeaway artist, and post player over his 20-year career—the Royal Oak has picked up a few tricks in that time, too. James is wearing one of the most advanced versions of the Royal Oak in existence: made out of black ceramic with a completely skeletonized dial.
In the last week, both James and Hov wore their Patek Philippe Tiffany Nautilus. Lamar is keeping pace with his own take on the trend: Rolex’s Oyster Perpetual with a turquoise dial. Rolex released a series of these OPs with luminous dials in 2020, before the Tiffany Nautilus arrived, but Lamar’s turquoise version benefitted massively from the sky-blue-dial trend, at least from a value perspective. Rolex discontinued all of its colorful OPs just two years later, in 2022, but Lamar’s Grammy’s watch shows this Tiffany-dial trend isn’t going anywhere.
Kevin Durant’s new teammate (as a Nets fan, I’m not mad! I’m not owned!) has a deep appreciation for the classics. Whether that’s his collection of cars from the ‘50s, his Kobe-indebted game, or what he puts on his wrist. While most hoopers prefer Patek’s Aquanaut or Nautilus, Booker wore one of the brand’s grand complications with a perpetual calendar (meaning it can accurately keep track of the date and day of the week until the year 2100). Maybe Book picked up a few pointers from teammate Chris Paul, who also prefers more traditional and highly complicated watches over new sportier pieces.
To me, every version of the JLC Reverso, one of the original sport watches made specifically for polo players, is special. Park’s is extra special, though: developed for the watch’s 90th anniversary, it comes with a green dial inspired by the forest that surrounds the brand’s manufacturer in Le Sentier, Switzerland. Rather than use a third seconds hand, the subdial at 6 o’clock keeps track of the seconds, a function known as “small seconds.”
I appreciate how watchmakers develop dramatic-sounding names for functions like the one on Park’s watch. It’s not a stopwatch, it’s a CHRONOGRAPH; not a seconds subdial but SMALL SECONDS; not a series of ding dongs signaling the time but a GRAND SONNERIE. Good tip for your own life when describing your own day to day. You’re not zombieishly plugging numbers into an Excel, you’re COMMANDING BIG FIGURES. Go you.