Promiscuous Wrist: Getting Promiscuous with Richard Mille and the RM 030

The remarkable Mr. Richard Mille may have the most dramatic disparity of fame vs. actual production numbers of any watchmaker in the world. Everyone has heard of him, it seems, but thanks to his extremely small annual output of watches, outside of that place where the circles of a Venn diagram of high net worth, high testosterone, watch-insider knowledge, and transgressive personal style overlap, it is very unusual in the extreme to even see a Richard Mille watch in the flesh (or nanocarbon and grade 5 titanium, as the case may be) much less have an opportunity to actually wear one.

Which is why we leaped at the chance when offered a Richard Mille RM 030 to wear for a couple of weeks. Regular REVOLUTION readers know we don't shy from hyperbole, but there is little hyperbole equal to the experience of having a crack at an RM watch, and for a dyed-in-the-wool watch nut on a less-than-billionaire's budget, having a chance to wear a Richard Mille watch is rather like being handed the keys to a Veyron with a winking request to bring it back --say, in a week or two --without too many scratches on the paint.


(The Richard Mille RM 030)

A quick rundown on the RM 030 (though most reading this probably know the watch well already.) The RM 030 is not one of Richard Mille's highly complicated watches; in fact, it's a leanly purposeful timepiece that shows the time and date only. What makes it unique is the set up of the automatic winding system, which features a rotor that disengages itself from the automatic winding train --via an in-house designed mechanism --when the mainspring reaches a certain point in the power reserve. Specifically, at 50 hours of power reserve the winding system disengages, but when the power reserve falls to 40 hours, the winding system kicks in again and stays active until a 50 hour reserve is reached. The rotor also features Richard Mille's variable geometry rotor whose inertia can be adjusted to optimize the rotor's efficiency depending on the level of activity typical of the owner (bespoke inertia; now there's modern luxury for you.)

Whether or not the rotor is engaged is shown by an indicator on the dial. . .



. . . just under the 12, and there is a power reserve indicator at 9. The date is shown in a window at 7 (actually, in a window that replaces the 7 on the dial) surrounded in black-slashed yellow and balanced by the "RM 030" in yellow at 3. The movement is visible front and back thanks to a transparent dial and sapphire display back, and the whole composition is anchored by the four screws used to mount the movement to the case. All the expected chronometric enhancements are present and correct as well, including a variable inertia, freesprung balance and a double mainspring barrel system, and the plate, bridges, and balance cock are titanium as is the case. The whole ensemble is very light but gives a pleasing impression of complexity and depth.

The first time you pick the watch up, you wonder if your mind is playing tricks on you, because you're getting much different information from your hands than from your eyes. Richard Mille famously was inspired by the world of F1 car design --racing machines for the wrist, eh? --and remains by far the most convincing example in modern watchmaking (at least in my opinion) of a really organic expression of the fusion of the world of watch design with the high performance motorsports world. Lightness, rigidity, and strength are in many respects mutually incompatible goals and the degree to which they can be made to play nice with each other depends on the deployment of exotic materials as well as a good understanding of the physical forces to which the system you are designing will be subjected.

Now, a watch is not an F1 car but Richard Mille famously orients himself towards hypothetical environmental extremes, and from his habit of gleefully throwning his tourbillons to the floor, to strapping them on the wrists of F1 drivers and tennis stars, he does do everything in his power to make sure there's some steak with all that high tech sizzle. Thus, the incredible lightness of his watches. The sturdy construction of the case, with its complex powerfully convex curves and lavishly finished surfaces, is a bit of a trompe l'oeil effect --you expect it to nestle in the hand with the reassuring mass of a gold nugget, but instead it seems poised for flight; so light that at first you think it's not a watch, but an hallucination of a watch.



It's this dramatic cognitive gap that gives the RM 030 much of its interest and which also makes it difficult to understand what Richard Mille is after without actually having a chance to handle the watch in person. It is the watch re-imagined in a rather subversive way --luxury defined not by an additive, but by a reductive process which leaves only what is essential but which also shows just how much room for expression there is in such essentialism.

It is not a watch that outside of watch enthusiast circles particularly excites notice, either --though within them it immediately eliciits dropped jaws, mid-sentence silences, and requests to try it on. Yes, it's an insider's watch but that's part of the appeal. The ghostly lightness of the watch is matched by the beautiful and subtle iridescence that it has on the wrist; the components inside shimmer like the flakes of color in an opal and depending on the incident angle of the light you could look at the watch a hundred times a day and get a hundred different impressions every time. (This also makes it an infuriating watch to photograph as the reflectivity of all those lovingly polished surfaces virtually ensures a blown highlight somewhere in the shot.)

On the wrist, it's not only comfortable but so beautifully close fitting and light that it's easy to forget it's there --only when you want to know the time do you look down and realize you have a miniature mechanical world on your wrist.



The RM 030 is not the lightest watch made by Richard Mille but it is currently one of the purest interpretations of his original core philosophy and inspiration in the collection --devoid of additional complications, stripped to the essentials, and purposeful as the racing machines that inspired it, but like them possessing an eerie, otherworldy beauty as well.

Go to richardmille.com to find out more. As of today (November 2, 2011) prices in the USA are: $85,000 in titanium, $90,000 in red gold, and $95,000 in white gold.

J.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/02/2011 01:15PM by Jack Forster.