The finest Met Gala watches behaved like portable artwork. Click here to zoom in on the magnificent wristgame at the Met this year.
The finest Met Gala watches behaved like portable artwork. Click here to zoom in on the magnificent wristgame at the Met this year.
May 4, 2026
The Met Gala 2026's theme invited fashion to behave like art, and the strongest Met Gala watches understood the assignment.
A great gala watch has a different responsibility from a daily watch. It must hold its own beside couture, jewels, flash photography and celebrity mythology. It has to attract from a distance, then reward close attention.
Jay-Z’s wristgame at the Met Gala 2026 is the night’s most expensive horological statement. His Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime Ref. 6300G is estimated to be worth a shocking $6 milllion. The timepiece is a double-faced white-gold watch with an ebony black opaline dial, hand-guilloché hobnail detail and a patented reversible case that lets the wearer display either the time side or the calendar side. Widely regarded as Patek Philippe’s most complicated wristwatch, the Grandmaster Chime took years of development and contains a 1,366-part movement plus a 214-part case, with 20 complications including a perpetual calendar, moon phases, minute repeater and five chiming modes. Its most extraordinary acoustic features are two patented world premieres: an alarm that strikes the programmed time and a date repeater that chimes the date on demand. Originally launched commercially around 2016, the reference has since become one of the most coveted modern Pateks, with Jay-Z’s black-dial version often valued around $6 million to $6.5 million on today’s market, making it arguably the most expensive accessory seen on the Met Gala 2026 red carpet.
Rami Malek’s Cartier Crash was one of the night’s most intelligent choices because it already behaves like a Met object. It has glamour, myth, distortion and danger in its silhouette. First created in London in 1967, the Crash has long been treated as one of Cartier’s strangest masterpieces, a watch that looks as though someone pulled classical elegance through a dream.
Its origin story is part of its seduction. Some collectors connect the warped case to Salvador Dalí’s melting clocks. Another legend places the design closer to Cartier’s own world: A damaged Baignoire Allongée brought into the London workshop, its shape transformed by accident into something unexpectedly beautiful. Whether one prefers the art-history reading or the Cartier folklore, the result is the same. The Crash turns timekeeping into distortion.
The Roman numerals on the watch stretch, lean and bend with the case, while the hands appear trapped inside a private disturbance. The watch keeps time while visually questioning the stability of time itself.
On Malek, whose style often leans precise and cinematic, the Crash felt especially sharp. It brought a little instability to the polish. In a room crowded with jewels, it succeeded by looking slightly haunted.
Dwayne Johnson’s Jacob & Co. Billionaire III was the loudest watch statement of the night, and it knew exactly what it was doing.
The Billionaire III belongs to the extreme end of high jewelry watchmaking. Its presence comes from both volume and precision, rows of large white diamonds arranged across the case and bracelet, with an open-worked tourbillon movement visible at the center. The effect is almost contradictory. The diamonds create mass, while the skeletonized movement creates air. The watch appears heavy and floating at once.
The Ashoka-cut diamonds are central to the drama. Known for their elongated cushion-like shape and complex faceting, they require exceptional rough stones and expert cutting. On a watch, that level of stone matching becomes a feat of patience. The gems must create visual rhythm across a curved object that still needs to sit on a wrist, move with the wearer, and frame a functioning mechanical caliber.
This is where Jacob & Co. often finds its territory: Spectacle supported by technical confidence. The Billionaire III could have become pure excess, priced at a whooping $3 million. Instead, the visible movement gives the diamonds a mechanical soul. It reminds the viewer that the piece is still a watch, even when it behaves like a fortress.
Nicholas Hoult’s Vacheron Constantin Traditionnelle Perpetual Calendar offered the evening’s most restrained form of horological power. Amid diamonds, serpents and surrealist cases, this watch spoke in complications, proportion and old-world confidence.
A perpetual calendar is one of watchmaking’s most elegant mechanical ideas. It tracks the irregularities of the calendar, months with 28, 30 and 31 days, plus leap years. In most standard perpetual calendars, the wearer can leave the mechanism alone until the year 2100, when the Gregorian calendar creates an exception. This is why the complication feels almost philosophical. It is a machine built for a future its owner may never see.
Vacheron Constantin gives that intelligence a classical face. The Traditionnelle line is formal, balanced and deeply Genevan in spirit. Its beauty lies in restraint: Slim markers, careful subdials, disciplined finishing, a case perfectly proportioned. In short, a textbook example of quiet luxury accessories.
That attitude made it one of the smartest Met Gala watches of the night. In a setting designed for instant impact, Hoult’s watch offered a version of luxury based on continuity rather than spectacle. Founded in 1755, Vacheron Constantin carries the weight of continuous watchmaking history, and the Maltese Cross emblem itself comes from a mechanical component once used to regulate the force of a mainspring.
Russell Wilson’s Jacob & Co. Astronomia Meteorite stood out among this year’s Met Gala watches as one of the most theatrical interpretations of the “Costume Art” brief, the timepiece is worth approximately $1.6 million.
Built around a dramatic three-dimensional movement, the Astronomia Meteorite stages a miniature celestial performance beneath its domed sapphire crystal, with rotating satellites carrying a triple-axis tourbillon, a hand-painted Earth globe, a Jacob-cut gem and a readable time display held upright through a patented differential system. Its meteorite-inspired architecture, diamond-set construction and 50mm case turn the wrist into something like a private observatory, where mechanics, astronomy and high jewelry move in constant orbit.
Aside from Nicholas Hoult's Vacheron Constantin, the quiet luxury route was also chosen by Maluma at the 2026 Met Gala. The Bvlgari Octo Finissimo serves as a masterclass in quiet luxury accessories. Celebrated for its radical pursuit of thinness, featuring a sandblasted Grade 5 titanium case that is just 2.35mm thick, its architectural design, inspired by the Roman Basilica of Maxentius, incorporates 110 separate facets to create a complex yet understated geometric profile. By opting for a matte finish and a refined 37mm size, the watch provides a sharp, modern contrast to high-fashion tailoring without relying on overt opulence.
The strongest watches of the evening succeeded because each one had a point of view. Cartier gave us surrealism. Bulgari gave us anatomy and myth. Jacob & Co. gave us architectural excess. Chopard gave us nature transformed into high jewelry. Vacheron Constantin gave us time as calculation, memory and inheritance.
That range made the watches feel especially relevant to the “Fashion Is Art” brief. They were decorative, of course, but they were also conceptual. They reminded us that horology has always been one of luxury’s most intimate art forms. A watch touches the skin. It follows the pulse. It measures the day while carrying centuries of craft inside a space smaller than the palm.
Clothing inevitably dominates the first wave of attention, but the wrists surely deserve their own close-up. The Met Gala watches this year served magnificient spetacle!
