Watch Paparazzi

Artist Alec Monopoly spotted wearing Jacob & Co

Aboard what appears to be a private superyacht — lush green hillside and marina in the background — Alec Monopoly paused long enough for the camera to catch one of the rarest watches in his collection: the Jacob & Co Caviar Flying Tourbillon in 18-carat white gold, invisibly set from lug to dial with baguette-cut diamonds. At a retail price of $910,000, this is not a watch that gets ignored at anchor.

The Caviar Flying Tourbillon represents the apex of Jacob & Co's high-jewellery watchmaking. The case and bezel are blanketed with 424 baguette-cut diamonds arranged in concentric rows using invisible setting — a painstaking technique in which each stone is rail-set with no visible metal prongs, creating an uninterrupted field of white light. A single rose-cut diamond, deliberately chosen for its softer, domed silhouette, finishes the winding crown. The movement beneath is a manually wound calibre with a flying tourbillon at 6 o'clock, meaning the tourbillon bridge is absent, leaving the cage to appear to float freely against the skeletonised dial. Blued sword-shaped hands provide the only colour contrast on the dial. The edition is strictly limited to 18 pieces globally.

For serious collectors, invisible-set diamond watches occupy a narrow and often undervalued corner of horological connoisseurship. The labour required — each baguette must be individually cut to fit its neighbour with sub-millimetre precision — rivals the movement work underneath. Jacob & Co, founded in New York in 1986 by Jacob Arabo, built its reputation precisely at this intersection of high jewellery and haute horlogerie, and the Caviar Flying Tourbillon is arguably the brand's clearest statement of that philosophy in a single reference.

Alec Monopoly, the Los Angeles-born artist known for his Monopoly Man street-art iconography and collaborations with luxury brands, has long used high-end timepieces as extensions of his visual identity. Wearing the Jacob & Co Caviar Flying Tourbillon — itself a piece of wearable sculpture — on a yacht in what appears to be the Caribbean is precisely on-brand: maximalist, rare, and photographically compelling.

On the secondary market, examples of the Caviar Flying Tourbillon rarely surface; when they do, the 18-piece limitation tends to sustain or marginally exceed retail pricing. At $910,000 list, the watch sits comfortably among six-figure diamond tourbillons from Graff and Backes & Strauss, though Jacob & Co's pop-culture cachet adds a layer of accessibility — and visibility — that strictly maison-focused jewellery brands do not always command.