A Rolex is usually treated like an object of control. Precision, status, inheritance, restraint, time held in perfect mechanical discipline. Olaolu Slawn, naturally, has found a way to make it misbehave.
With Rolex Multiverse, the British-Nigerian artist expands his relationship with the Swiss watchmaker into a new custom watch project built around 12 one-of-one timepieces. Rather than a conventional collaboration, the series operates like a cultural constellation, bringing together figures from music, sport, fashion, and contemporary art, each receiving a uniquely designed watch shaped through Slawn’s graffiti-driven visual world.
The project was first teased through a webcam-style video, giving the whole thing the feeling of a leak, a transmission, or a private joke suddenly made public. That framing matters. Slawn’s work has always thrived on collision: high and low, luxury and vandalism, innocence and aggression, painting and meme logic, the art world and the street refusing to stay separate.
The line-up already reads like a map of contemporary culture’s stranger intersections. Confirmed names include Gunna, Lil Yachty, Mario Balotelli, Ronaldinho, Verdy, Clint419, and Gabriel Moses, with 11 collaborators publicly identified so far and one final participant still unrevealed.
That mystery is part of the theatre. Each watch becomes less like an accessory and more like a character study: a meeting point between Slawn’s restless, graffiti-led hand and the identity of whoever wears it. A Rolex, usually designed to transcend personality, is pushed in the opposite direction. It becomes personal, unstable, specific.
The project also builds on Slawn’s earlier experiments with hand-painted Rolex watches, where the language of luxury timekeeping was interrupted by his raw, cartoonish, semi-chaotic mark-making. In Rolex Multiverse, that gesture becomes more structured, but not necessarily more polite. The watch remains precious, but the surface is no longer untouchable.
Rolling out across August 2026, Rolex Multiverse suggests that collaboration does not always need mass release, product saturation, or easy accessibility to make an impact. Sometimes, the object can remain almost mythical — passed between artists, athletes, rappers, designers, and image-makers like a rumour with a dial.