Some people are said to wear their hearts on their sleeves. Others put all their most obscene desires on their wrist. That latter camp includes Drake: Remember when the rapper wore Richard Mille’s “Erotic” watch to an NBA Finals game in 2019? That piece, known as reference—and this is not a joke—RM 69, functions not unlike a horny Mad Libs: The pusher on the side activates the three bars on the dial to flip until it generates a random prurient phrase. And the small club of owners now includes rapper and McDonald’s collaborator Travis Scott. This morning, Scott posted a picture of himself wearing the watch, with its bleepers set to the ever-subtle “Let Me Explore Your Pussy.”
The RM 69 is not unlike a comet: appearing once or twice a lifetime in unforgettable fashion. I haven’t seen it in the wild since Drake took it for a spin, and every time I see the piece, I’m slightly stunned it’s a real object and not a prop invented for 30 Rock’s Tracy Jordan.
But this watch is real, and it’s spectacular. If you need a refresher, here’s how it works. The top bar displays a series of declaratives: “I want to,” “I need to,” “I long to,” “I lust to,” “I’d love to,” and “Let me.” The middle bar covers verbs, well-known as the sexiest parts of speech: “explore,” “taste,” “kiss,” “arouse,” “devour,” and “caress.” The bottom bar answers the question of when, where, or how: “you tonight,” “your lips,” “your body,” “your nipples,” “your pussy,” and “you madly.”
The watch was designed to nestle into a surprisingly long lineage of “erotic” watches, according to Richard Mille’s website. Watchmakers have been stowing small erotic paintings in the case backs of pocket watches since the 17th century. Other recent examples are somehow cruder than Richard Mille’s take on the tradition. Pieces like the Ulysse Nardin Hourstriker Erotica Jarretiere use the watch’s movement to literally put the act into motion. In the ’90s, Blancpain created a similar movement located on the case back of the watch—it’s business in the front and (sex) party in the back. Richard Mille’s Erotic watch is meant to be explicit about its explicitness. “On the RM 69, however, love and eroticism proclaim themselves proudly and clearly in words,” the RM website reads.
Like Drake before him, Travis Scott is accumulating quite the collection of watches, erotic and not. He wears a chocolate-brown Richard Mille and strapped on a candy-striped one—his own—for this magazine. He has incredibly precious Patek Philippes and diamond-set Audemars Piguets. But as both Drake and Scott are now proof, no modern collector’s work is finished until they wear the RM 69.