These Are Justin Bieber's Best Watches
Even though he’s only 26, Justin Bieber has been in our lives for a long time. Over the past decade, we’ve seen him grow up from baby-faced “Baby” singer and sleek
perfectly packaged popstar of the Believe era to the mangy-haired, sometimes-mustachioed and always-sweatsuited king. Which is to say: a lot can change in the course of 10 years. Styles change, trends change, and haircuts change—and so do the watches we care about. Bieber’s collection is emblematic of that relatively swift overhaul. He’s gone from wearing chunky plastic G-Shocks on the red carpet to making a gold Rolex Daytona his standard everyday. Below, we track all the changes and take a look at Bieber’s best watches.
During G-Shock’s heyday in the aughts, few celebrities wore these huge chunky pieces quite as often as Bieber did. He owned several different colors—red, black, and the above white—and wore them to events typically associated with watches worth ten times as much. This one featured the brand’s new-at-the-time and more comfortable “G-Lide” band, and also tracked the moon and tide phases—perfect for “your next surfing excursion,” G-Shock says. Despite all that functionality, Bieber and the rest of us don’t wear many of these watches in 2020. Bieber’s G-Shock is a lot like his swooping bangs: something that drove people crazy over a decade ago that we’ve decided to pretend didn’t really happen.
The first proper watch Bieber started wearing was this very blingy version of the Rolex Day-Date II. The watch is an undeniable fit for the era of Bieber when his hair was sculpted as carefully as Michaelangelo’s “David” and when he would wear a peculiar number of boldly colored suit jackets with the sleeves rolled up. The Day-Date is an entry-level Rolex, so you might say a version of it rimmed with diamonds is the perfect piece for a popstar on the rise.
Over the past couple of weeks, this is the watch the Biebs has been wearing most often. When he needs a watch to pair with a full banana-yellow sweatsuit, he grabs this gold Rolex Daytona. When he is prepping for his Saturday Night Live performance, or running around New York for fancy-pants outings with Hailey, he’s wearing this gold Rolex Daytona. Over the past decade or so, watch collectors have shifted from switching between a daytime watch and dressy one to wearing a sporty, casual piece like the Daytona all the time. Bieber’s doing it just right.
For a world-touring multimillionaire popstar, Bieber’s watches are surprisingly low-key: there’s not a Richard Mille or bust-down something-or-other in sight, even if those are the watches often collected by his contemporaries. BUt then you arrive here: at this version of the beloved Patek Philippe Nautilus set with 255–let’s really take that in: two hundred and fifty five!—diamonds. Incredibly, this isn’t something whipped up on the aftermarket either. This is Patek Philippe seeing what everyone else was doing to its Nautilus and proving out it can do better. Bieber may not have many massively in-your-face superstar watches, but this $300,000 piece alone probably makes up for that.
See, when a man loves a woman, he might ask her to be his wife. And to really make those nuptials official, said lovestruck man might...buy himself a watch. At least, that’s what Bieber did when he married his wife Hailey Baldwin. To celebrate his new union last year, Bieber bought himself a vintage Audemars Piguet from the early 1980s—or roughly a full decade and a half before the singer was even born. It’s a simple, trend-immune, fully iconic watch that any collector would love to have in their collection. Unfortunately, not every collector is Justin Bieber.