Keith Richards — watch collection

About Keith Richards’s watch collection

Keith Richards is one of the most recognisable guitarists in rock history, best known as a founding member and primary songwriter of the Rolling Stones. Alongside Mick Jagger, Richards built a catalog that includes Exile on Main St., Sticky Fingers, and Let It Bleed — records that reshaped what rock and roll could sound like and mean. Beyond the Stones, he released solo work, most notably Talk Is Cheap in 1988, and has remained a working musician for over six decades. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Rolling Stones in 1989.

The Keith Richards watch collection, at least as documented through candid photographs and tour imagery, leans toward Cartier — specifically the yellow gold Cartier Panthère. Richards was photographed wearing one during the Rolling Stones' Steel Wheels Tour of 1989, the band's first major tour in seven years and one of the highest-grossing rock tours of its era at that point. The watch appears on his left wrist in a candid shot where he is holding a Fender Telecaster, the image carrying an odd but coherent contrast: a piece of French jewellery-house craftsmanship worn by a man whose public persona is built around deliberate roughness.

The Cartier Panthère was launched in 1983, though Cartier's relationship with the panther motif goes back to 1914. The model Richards wore — compact, yellow gold, bracelet-integrated — sits closer to jewellery than to tool watch, which makes its appearance on a rock guitarist all the more interesting. It suggests a collector who picks what appeals to him without much concern for category conventions, wearing a dress watch on stage the same way he might wear a suit jacket over a torn t-shirt.