Richard Mille’s latest collection is the RM 07-01 Coloured Ceramics. Full of colour, fun, and refreshing, it takes its inspiration from the Memphis Design Movement, an Italian 1980s art and architectural movement. Moving away from conventional watch design thanks to its contrasting colours, shapes and materials, the new Richard Mille RM 07-01 Automatic Coloured Ceramics makes a serious statement about the idea of fun and lightheartedness.
The Memphis design is particularly fascinating in its diversity and freedom. Its creators’ goal at the time was to escape the strictures of modernist aesthetics by blending Art Deco geometry with pop art style colours. The heart of the design process for this collection was the idea of juxtaposing colours in materials like ceramic and patterned rubber. Then the technical team enriched their work by weaving in the ancient craft of guilloché for the dial. This creates a symbiosis of the ultra-modern and the traditional in watchmaking.
Creating hand guilloché dials is an art form that requires special, hand-guided machines, as well as the hands of expert craftspeople who have decades of experience. Richard Mille has incorporated this artisanal technique with a twist. Instead of adopting familiar patterns of traditional guillochage, the RM 07-01 Coloured Ceramics uses these techniques in bold ways, sculpting a motif inspired at once by Memphis Design and the Richard Mille universe. This motif is engraved on a white gold segment, surrounded by decorative detailing in ceramic, coloured rubber appliques and diamond-set elements. A grey PVD-treated white gold serves as a display of all of these elements.
The new RM 07-01 collection is available in three summer-derived colors including blush pink, lavender, and powder blue ceramics that have been carefully selected to contrast elegantly with other hues dotted the watches. Tetragonal Zirconia Polycrystal —TZP— ceramic used by Richard Mille for the bezels and case backs is renowned for its lightness, strength, and color retention properties. Even over long periods of time, the hue of this sophisticated material remains perfectly balanced and unfaded. A special sintering process also gives the ceramic a desirable matte effect. The case size is 31.40 x 45.23 x 11.85 mm
Fixed on white gold micro-blasted casebands with polished pillars, these ceramic bezels protect the calibre CRMA2, an automatic winding in-house movement created from skeletonized, micro-blasted, and electro-plasma-treated grade 5 titanium. It sports a variable-inertia balance maintaining perfect long-term performance, and a rotor in 5N 18K red gold with variable geometry which adapts the winding of the watch to the movements of the wearer. The movement provides a power reserve of 50 hours.
The juxtaposition of colours gives the RM 07-01 strong characters, but what brings the entire design to another level is the contrast of the blocks of colours and different surface textures with the delicate lines of the guilloché dial segments and the calibre architecture. In this way, they are totally contemporary in every aspect of design, material choices and colourways, yet here they have been fused together with a pattern and method of embellishment taken from the 18th century that evokes a sense of elegance and magic.
Sticker Price $205,000 USD. For more info on Richard Mille click here.
