Richard Mille is back with another round of watches bursting with color.
Reminiscent of its candy-themed Bonbon collection from 2019, which included a baby pink ceramic watch whose dial looked like licorice and a white ceramic piece with a dial decorated in a twist of pastels meant to look like a marshmallow treat, the collection shocked the watch world when it debuted at SIHH in Geneva (now Watches & Wonders). Those sold out within two days and its latest brightly hued timepieces will likely fly just as quickly.
Inspired by the Memphis Movement, an ’80s Italian design and architecture group founded by Ettore Sottsass and known for its wild pops of color and geometric shapes. It’s a style that has also influenced Boucheron’s recent high jewelry reveal, a groundbreaking collection full of bright hues and asymmetrical shapes that evoked an overall ’80s vibe. Take, for example, a necklace made to look like a Rubik’s cube.
The new RM 07-01 collection has that same funky aesthetic in a trio of sky blue, cotton candy pink, and lavender-cased ceramic models. The dials are accented with geometric shapes like triangles, circles, rectangles, half moons, and more in similar colors and each is hand-guilloched but looks unlike anything you might otherwise find employing the traditional Swiss horological technique. The pieces are powered by the caliber CRMA2, a skeletonized automatic winding movement with hours and minutes and a variable geometry rotor. It sports 50 hours of power reserve. Visible through the casebook, the movements are just as visually impressive as the dials.
The calibers are housed within a 31.40 x 45.23 x 11.85 mm case. These are billed as ladies’ models—in Richard Mille’s universe, by comparison, the bestselling men’s model, the RM 65-01, is 40.5 mm by 50 mm—however, they could easily be worn by any gender. It’s more a matter of whether or not its wearer has the style to rock it. On this writer’s admittedly small wrist, the RM 07-01 wore a little large and the stiffness of the patent leather straps wore more like a bangle than a strap. Each comes with a velcro closure instead of a metal clasp or pin buckle in another nod to the ’80s, which is fun but it might have felt more elevated with a deployant metal closure. Nevertheless, there’s no denying that these are super fun and unique and, like most things in the Richard Mille universe, will instantly sell out.