The Avant-Garde Watch Brand Balancing Extreme Sport And Style
Founded in 2001, Swiss watchmaking maison Richard Mille crafts haute horlogerie masterpieces that suit supreme sporting endeavours and ultra-chic lifestyles
Take a quick glance at the women counted as friends of avant-garde Swiss watchmaking maison Richard Mille, and one thing becomes immediately clear – its watches are engineered to suit multi-faceted women in a fast-paced world, from dawn until dusk.
With sports watches designed to cope with the demands of top athletes and highly stylised designs to suit chic tastemakers, all of Richard Mille’s timepieces are crafted with a common quest in mind – to marry ingenious craftsmanship with unequalled aesthetics. Among its many unisex collections, the maison does, however, have several powerhouse collections that ensure every woman’s needs are met, including the sportif chic RM 07-04 Automatic Sport, and the RM 07-01 Coloured Ceramics, which brings a little glamour to the everyday.
The RM 07-04 Automatic Sport is the maison’s first women’s sports watch, which caters to everyday sporting pursuits and elite athletes alike. Endorsed by motorsports star Aurora Straus, world number two golfer Nelly Korda, and Winter Olympics triple gold medallist Ester Ledecká, the timepiece took three years in development to ensure it flawlessly combines ergonomics and ultra-lightness, performance and resistance, while preserving the maison’s extreme skeletonized aesthetic.
The six different iterations of the RM 07-04 Automatic Sport offer endless versatility with a range of bold, brazen colours, with each one displaying a compact, skeletonized in-house movement while guaranteeing 5000g shock resistance and weighing just 36 grams. With so few maisons daring to design a skeletonised women’s sports watch, the RM 07-04 Automatic Sport stands out for both style and substance.
Similarly, the RM 07-01 Coloured Ceramics collection was principally designed as a stylish ladies leisure watch, but still displays the extraordinary technical ingenuity synonymous with the maison. Inspired by the Italian 1980’s art and architecture movement Memphis Design, the watch bears intricate, guilloché details – an age-old craft requiring exceptional savoir-faire – married with pastel case designs and rubber straps in bright colours that speak of summer vacations.
A playful expression of contrasting shapes and materials, this is a timepiece that doesn’t take itself too seriously, while still flaunting the maison’s calibre CRMA2 automatic winding in-house movement. The calibre CRMA2 is protected by bezels and casebacks crafted from Tetragonal Zirconia Polycrystal ceramic – known for its weightlessness and strength – while steadfastly retaining the summery lavender, pink and powder blue hues chosen for the collection. While Richard Mille timepieces are readily spotted on the wrists of pro-athletes, they are also worn by A-list celebrities such as Michelle Oh upon the red carpet, further proving their innate hybridism.
Whether designed to suit extreme sporting endeavours or to create wearable art for the wrist, one thing is clear; Richard Mille excels at wear-me-anywhere-and-everywhere haute horlogerie.
Images supplied by Richard Mille