Cyril Kongo — watch collection

About Cyril Kongo’s watch collection

Cyril Kongo is a French graffiti artist and painter born in Paris in 1969, widely recognized as one of the most significant figures to emerge from the European street art scene. Over a career spanning more than three decades, he has moved fluidly between the street and the gallery, executing large-scale murals across cities worldwide while exhibiting in institutional and commercial spaces from Tokyo to New York. His visual language — dense, layered calligraphy built from overlapping letters and color fields — is immediately recognizable, and it has attracted collaborations with luxury houses including Louis Vuitton, Hennessy, and Porsche. Kongo's work sits at a productive tension between accessibility and craft, between the democratic origins of graffiti and the rarefied world of collectible art.

The Cyril Kongo watch collection, at least as documented in public sightings, centers on a single but deeply significant piece: the Richard Mille RM 68-01. This is not a watch Kongo simply wears as a brand ambassador — he co-created it with the Swiss manufacture, contributing his visual identity directly to the dial and case architecture. The RM 68-01 is built around Richard Mille's skeletonized manual-winding tourbillon movement and houses it in a case combining Carbon TPT — the brand's proprietary filament-wound carbon composite, laid at alternating 45-degree angles — with a black ceramic bezel and caseback. The result is a watch that is genuinely light, structurally rigid, and visually chaotic in a controlled way that mirrors Kongo's own painting process.

What makes this particular piece notable beyond its technical specifications is the authenticity of the collaboration. Kongo's hand is visible in the design in a direct, traceable way rather than being reduced to a signature on a standard reference. For a collection that, publicly, contains just this one confirmed sighting, it nonetheless tells a coherent story: an artist who engages with watchmaking on his own terms, through a genuine creative partnership rather than a commercial arrangement.