Richard Mille’s stock in trade has never been ultra-thin watches – if anything, his timepieces over the years have been much more notable for how they play with depth, and some have been downright massive. However, when he wants to, he certainly can make thinner watches, often to very good effect. The rectangular RM 16, and more recently, the RM 33-01, are both departures from his usual idiom, and this year at the SIHH he showed his most recent, the RM 67-01, which is both his flattest watch so far and the first extra-flat watch he’s made in the tonneau-shaped case, which has been the foundation of his designs since the company launched its first watches in 2001.
Richard Mille’s design work is hard to fault. Assuming that you like this sort of approach to watch design at all, there is basically Richard Mille, and those who try – generally unsuccessfully – to imitate him. (Designing watches in the wake of Richard Mille is sort of like being a painter after Jackson Pollock, or a writer after James Joyce; attempting to copy their success by copying their language or visual vocabulary is tempting, and also a terrible idea.) The RM 67-01 is a great looking watch. The version shown here, in titanium, is, in terms of general fit and finish, very hard to fault; every surface has obviously been carefully considered in terms of its relationship to other elements of the dial, gear train, and case, and as we said in our look at the Apple Watch, attention to detail is really what makes real luxury what it is.
It’s true that Richard Mille has his own distinctive design language, but it’s also true that this sort of celebration of the aesthetic characteristics of industrial materials is a classic Modernist design strategy, and a few other notable exceptions aside (like the Royal Oak, which did for stainless steel in watches what Mies van der Rohe did for it in architecture) there are not a lot of watch designers out there who do this nearly as well as Richard Mille.
One interesting thing about his approach is that at least in broad terms, it’s actually pretty conservative, which I think is a big part of Mille's success. He’s very smart about challenging expectations, but offering that challenge in a reassuring framework so the whole thing doesn’t become too alienating.
Much of the appeal of his work is that of traditional watchmaking, in both finish and mechanics. Boasting that you have fast-rotating mainspring barrels and optimized gear-tooth profiles is about as inside baseball as it gets, and while there are modern industrial materials and finishing methods in Richard Mille's watches, overall his aesthetic effects still rely on the alternation of polished, matte, and brushed surfaces that have been the stock-in-trade of Genevan watchmaking for hundreds of years.
Where I really struggle with Richard Mille is in pricing. Pretty much anyone you talk to nowadays will agree that things have gotten out of hand, and that’s not just potential clients for watches; quite a few folks at a CEO or near-CEO level have commented to us that they’re really wondering (I’m paraphrasing) if the industry hasn’t painted itself into a corner. Where, exactly, does the disconnect between the value offered and the actual price start to become unacceptable? That, of course, depends on a lot of variables. Typically when we write about really expensive watches we end up shrugging our shoulders and saying something like, “I’m sure for its intended customers, price won’t matter,” or words to that effect. It’s also ridiculously easy to start treating prices as an abstraction that shouldn’t be relevant in watch design criticism. However, I think both of these are really starting to feel like an abdication of the responsibility to discuss something essential. After all, the extremely high prices in the art world are fair game for discussion in terms of how the art is seen; why not in watchmaking?
The starting price point for this watch is $85,000. This is a titanium cased, time-only watch, with a date guichet. There’s no doubt that high price is part of the appeal for a lot of Richard Mille clients – it’s part of what makes his watches such effective tokens of exclusivity, and they wouldn’t fill that role nearly as well if they weren’t so recognizable (and again, it doesn’t hurt that they’re generally really appealing as design objects). I think it’s obvious that making a lot of the conversation about his watches about high cost and exclusivity is a deliberate strategy; the major talking piece for RM at the SIHH was a one-million-dollar rattrapante chronograph tourbillon.
With respect to the RM 67-01, it’s obviously extremely expensive, but then again, there are watches by folks like Kari Voutilainen and Roger Smith that occupy similar price points while offering radically different value propositions, and perhaps the real disconnect in mechanical horology, at least at the high end, is not between value and price, but functionality and price. At this level, it almost becomes incidental that the object in question is a watch.
The Richard Mille RM 67-01 Automatic Extra Flat; titanium case, 38.70 mm x 47.52 mm x 7.75 mm. Hours, minutes, date; function indicator showing position of the crown. Movement, caliber CRMA6, 3.6 mm thick, designed by Richard Mille; platinum rotor with 50-hour power reserve, running in 25 jewels at 28,800 vph. Water resistance, 50 m. The movement is said by Richard Mille to have been “designed in-house by the engineers in Les Breuleux” – we’ve reached out to RM for clarification as we presume that the movement is manufactured by Vaucher to RM’s specifications and we’ll update our story at such time as RM responds. More on the RM 67-01 from Richard Mille right here.
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