Bulgari Aluminium GMT x Fender Limited Edition Celebrates 70 Years of the Stratocaster

While Italian watchmaker-jeweler Bulgari has been making headlines for more than a decade now with its record-setting ultra-thin Octo Finissimo models — and will surely make more with several of this year’s new Geneva Watch Days releases — it has also been, rather quietly, releasing appealing iterations of its other sport-luxury gents watch, the Aluminium, which returned to the lineup in 2020. The latest is the Aluminium GMT x Fender Limited Edition, a timepiece whose warm brown and cream-colored tones evoke, and celebrate, the iconic Fender Stratocaster guitar, which marks its 70th anniversary in 2024.

When you think about it, luxury watches and high-end guitars share a fair amount of commonalities in their design and build, from meticulous material selection, to a high degree of hand craftsmanship and finishing, to elite-level attention to detail in fine-tuning. For this new timepiece, which is limited to 1,200 total pieces, Bulgari watchmakers partnered with the guitar-making artisans (called luthiers) at the Fender Custom Shop in Corona, California to envision its distinctive colorway, which echoes the livery of the first guitars made by founder and eponym Leo Fender. The brown dial’s sunburst motif calls to mind the lacquer finish of classic Fender guitars; the contrasting dark brown and creamy white areas of the 24-hour GMT flange (the former indicating nighttime hours, the latter designating daytime) are also emblematic of the instrument. The polished, rhodium-plated hands and applied indexes subtly resemble the frets of a guitar. As on other models in the Aluminium series, the bezel is forged from rubber, here in an on-theme dark brown, with an engraved double “BVLGARI” in Roman-style characters.

 As per its name, and in keeping with the template established by the original model from the late ‘90s, the watch’s 40mm case is made chiefly of aluminum (Europeans spell it with the extra “i” and pronounce it with the extra syllable), with a titanium caseback, and is mounted on a sporty rubber strap that echoes the brown color of the bezel. Like the first GMT version of the Aluminium, unveiled in 2021 and targeted at antsy world  travelers eager to emerge from a year-plus of Covid-related lockdowns and travel restrictions, it has an arrow-tipped GMT hand accompanying the timekeeping hands on the dial to indicate a second time zone on the aforementioned two-tone scale on the flange.

Powering the watch behind the solid titanium caseback, with a black DLC coating and inscribed with both the Bulgari and Fender logos in this limited edition, is an in-house movement, Bulgari’s Caliber B192, based on the Sellita SW330-1, which features automatic winding and stores a power reserve of 42 hours.

The 1,200 pieces in this special edition are priced at $4,200. On August 30, 2024, Bulgari will release an even more limited 140-piece edition (70 for each of the two time zones indicated on the model’s GMT dial) in bespoke packaging inspired by classic guitar cases, along with a book tracing the 70-year history of the Stratocaster. Concurrently, the Fender Custom Shop will manufacture 70 Stratocaster guitars, on demand, in collaboration with Bulgari and executed by hand in the same color scheme as the watch.