Austin Butler Is Into Watches Now
Austin Butler is a man of many cultural references. Within the first ten minutes of our conversation, we touched on theatre (he’s seen Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary” three times: “Cole is absolutely brilliant.”), jazz (now listening: “After You’ve Gone” by Eiji Kitamura and Teddy Wilson) and the Vietnamese spiritual leader, Thích Nhất Hạnh. There’s a giddy enthusiasm he exudes through the Zoom screen, which is by no means dampened when the conversation steers towards Breitling’s new – also highly referential – Top Time B31 watches.
Today marks the launch of this new collection, which Butler is the face of, as well as being Breitling’s newest brand ambassador (or “Squad” member, in the brand’s parlance).
When he sat across from me on our video call to discuss this new role, I asked him, straight up, why he’d choose to work with Breitling when he — presumably, as a very on-demand A-list actor — could work with anyone.
The answer? Butler’s been getting into watches. “I grew up looking at pictures of these people I admired a lot — you know, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen — and the beautiful watches they wore,” he explains, naming two men who have transformed the respective brands they wore simply by wearing them. “It wasn’t until recently, though, that I got more educated and had the privilege of being able to wear watches — to understand what I like and choose what fits my style.”
Butler’s style, which he says flows from his “love of motorcycles and adventure” – all leather jackets, baggy cargo pants and trucker hats – is very much in line with the three new automatic “time-only” B31s, which descend from the OG Top Time introduced in the 1960s. Initially a chronograph (horological speak for a stop watch, used primarily in motorsport), the watch attracted a slew of stylish racing enthusiasts (including Bond, James Bond), its bold design aptly matching the high-speed mood of the time.
Having played Tex Watson, a central member of the Manson Family, in Quentin Tarantino’s ‘60s-inspired Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Butler respects the nuances of the decade that birthed the first Top Time watch. “It was such a tumultuous time for society itself, on one side, you have the horrors, but then you have the antithesis of that: the curiosity and the creativity and the love. People looking forward, wanting to create a brighter future.”
Among these people was Willy Breitling, the visionary behind the original Top Time watch, who took over the family-owned Breitling business at 19 years-old in 1932. Representing a new era for the brand, Willy leveraged the technical foundation laid by his father and grandfather, who founded Breitling in 1884, to push the limits of design. Among Willy’s many contributions was 1964’s unconventional Top Time, a striking chronograph that prioritized form over function. We might take this idea of a watch as a “statement piece” for granted – today, you’re more likely to see a guy flexing his chronograph at his office job than you would see a Formula 1 driver actually using one for racing. But in the ‘60s, pushing the limits of design for design’s sake was – whether Willy intended it or not – deeply forward thinking.
This aesthetic-oriented approach would, in fact, prove essential in sustaining Bretiling’s relevance as the sports and industries it supported started to depend less on watches for timekeeping, and more on the digital technology (like electronic dashboards) that began to emerge at the end of the ‘60s. That, and the watches just looked cool, attracting legends like Miles Davis, Serge Gainsbourg, and now, Austin Butler. “The Top Time speaks to the way I’ve always wanted to live my life: free and ready to rock ‘n’ roll,” he says, calling out his appreciation for the new collection’s three dial colors, clocking in at a cool 38mm (a period-correct size that doesn’t fall temptation to the big-gulp dimensions that have plagued most contemporary tool watches).
The “B31” addition to the Top Time name refers to the first three-hand “manufacture movement” designed and developed by Breitling, representing the historic Swiss watchmaker’s evolution toward exclusively offering movements made in-house. “I'm most excited to go to Switzerland and visit the Breitling manufacture,” says Butler, so he can learn to understand the movements and the overall watchmaking process.
It becomes clear to me, at this moment, that if Butler signs onto something, he’s going to commit and double down with his own research. This intentional approach applies to a life-altering acting role like Elvis – in which he integrated himself so deeply that he had difficulty shaking the rock legend’s Southern drawl post-filming – as it does to something as seemingly transactional as a brand ambassadorship. To Butler, a visit to Breitling’s factory in Switzerland honors his philosophy that the process is just as important as, if not more so, than the product. And this is where Thích Nhất Hạnh comes in.
“There's a great talk that he gives on the art of flower arranging. Have you heard this?” he asks casually, as one would about the latest episode of a pop-culture podcast. “The root of the process is… If you have inner harmony, then you’ll see harmony in the flowers,” Butler explains. “But if you’re just trying to put them in a vase, as opposed to caring for each one, there’s a difference.” On this note, he brings up painting, one of the many creative outlets he turns to off-duty (he’s also into photography and plays guitar). Instead of rushing to the final product, for Butler, it’s all about the process: “choosing the color, and mixing the color, in a way that is most pleasing to me, in that moment; the brush stroke being the most pleasing thing that I could possibly do, in that moment… Not needing it to be this thing about the future.”
He illustrates this further with a memory from his first visit to Rome, Italy early on in his career: “I visited the Borghese Gallery, where they have all these Bernini sculptures,” Butler recalls. His tour guide explained that the artist created them when he was just 21 years old, and he’d spent eight hours a day for a year and a half straight on one sculpture. “That amount of dedication to one thing – when most of those days, it would have looked like a blob – blows my mind.”
It’s not so unlike watchmaking, which is an old-fashioned, painstaking craft. “It’s such a lost art – the idea of actually putting time into things,” Butler observes. “We were just talking about how [the B31 movement] took four years to create, with these tiny parts, put together by hand… You gotta love it.”
Here, Butler, perhaps unknowingly, justifies the mere existence of analog watches today when, on paper, digital technology has rendered them all but obsolete. At its best, a watch can be a reminder, as he says, “to be present with what is actually right here in front of us and not just be rushing for the finish line.”
