Great watch wearers: Elvis Presley

The original ‘king of rock’ Elvis Presley clocked up an estimated 1bn records sold in his 30-year career, until his death in 1977 from heart failure (or drugs and peanut- butter fry-ups). The stats are outstanding: 108 Billboard Hot 100 hits, 18 of them number 1s (that’s 67 collective weeks in the top spot); 31 feature films and musicals; 837 consecutive sold-out Vegas shows. Elvis even released 10 Billboard hits while drafted in the US army from 1958-60. His iconic watches, from Omegas, Rolexes and Hamiltons, to Corum and Mathey-Tissot tell tales from his epic career.

The Tiffany & Co Omega with Omega’s hand-wound calibre 510, set in white gold with 44 brilliant-cut diamonds, is an elegant yet blinging showpiece.

The inscription on the backplate, “To Elvis 75m records RCA Victor 12-25-60”, tells us the watch was a Christmas gift from his record company on his return from the army. Hits like 1956’s Heartbreak Hotel and 1958’s Don’t Be Cruel sold 1m units that year alone – gift-worthy numbers indeed. The story goes that Elvis traded it with a buddy for a similarly diamond-encrusted Hamilton. Sold at auction in 2018, it reached CHF1.5m and was won by the Omega Museum Biel, Switzerland (the home of CW’s atelier).

That wasn’t the only Omega in Elvis’s collection. A black dialled, gold-capped, COSC-certified late-’50s Omega Constellation had raised indexes and date at 3. Elvis gave it to his friend Charlie Hodge, with whom he was stationed in Germany.

In a similar tale, an 18K solid yellow gold Corum Buckingham was gifted to Richard Davis, a friend and employee. Saying that there seemed to be something wrong with the watch, Elvis handed it to Davis. Flipping it over, Davis found the engraving, “To Richard from E.P.”

The then-American, now Swiss Swatch Group-owned Hamilton were kept busy by Elvis in the three decades of his career. The Hamilton Ventura, 1957, had a ground- breaking electric movement and striking case design. Working on a moving coil system, the balance wheel had an integrated coil, with permanent magnets embedded in the movement plate and mechanical contacts. He wore one in the 1961 movie Blue Hawaii, as a product placement. Incidentally, the watch was worn again by Will Smith in 1997’s Men In Black.

Some watches in Elvis’s collection were received as gifts and kept, like the Rolex King Midas given to Elvis in 1970 by officers of the Houston Astrodome Livestock Show and Rodeo, Texas, thanking him for what must have been an unforgettable six days of sold-out live shows. Nothing like any other watch before or since, its asymmetric case holds a hand wound movement, the design forming a point at the left-handed crown. It’s a glamorous, knock-out piece – and, with water ingress clearly visible on the dial, more than a little damaged.