Watch of the Week: RM 07-01 Coloured Ceramics
Marking 25 years, Richard Mille closes its RM 07-01 Coloured Ceramics series with a trio of bold, graphic timepieces that blur the line between watchmaking and wearable art.
- Words By Scarlett Baker
Anniversaries accrue in plenty throughout the world of watchmaking, with hallmark names routinely marking centenaries and beyond. Far rarer are celebrations of earlier milestones – but as Richard Mille marks 25 years this year, its latest release makes a compelling case for why a quarter century is worth shouting about loudly.
While young in tenure, Richard Mille has built a reputation for treating a watch not simply as a discreet timekeeping instrument, but as a site of engineering theatre. The RM 07-01 Coloured Ceramics collection is a vivid expression of that intent. Raising the curtains on this ensemble in 2021, it established a disruptive graphic identity on the wrist on debut, a reminder that a watch can operate as a canvas as much as a mechanism. And now, we head into the final act as Richard Mille closes the saga with a maximalist interplay of high-contrast colour and materials across three new models.
From its inception, the RM 07-01 has aimed to bring playful homage to the wrist. Not a dutiful revival of heritage for preservation's sake (after all, the brand was all but born), yet with a contemporary nod to a more irreverent era: the 1980s. Drawing on that spirit of emancipation, the dial becomes the focal point. A Tetris-like arrangement of laser-cut forms creates a segmented, collaged surface, an unmistakable echo of the Memphis design movement that defined the decade.
This fragmented composition sets up an interplay of textures from diamond-set surfaces, laser-cut rubber appliqués, and engraved lines, where curved edges and hard lines collide. The result sits somewhere between anti-harmonious and precisely resolved, a tension that gives the dial its energy – and there’s undoubtedly a lot of it.
Building on its 2021 beginnings, the pastel palette evolves across this trio in ceramic cases: pink lavender with an orange crown, blush pink with yellow, and powder blue with teal. The colours bring a sense of chromatic intensity, but the material itself, high-tech ceramic, retains the durability expected for accompanying you through daily life.
The fantasia behind this holy trinity ceases to stop just there, with a bezel working overtime to arrest your attention. Result: it does just that, with a gentle frosting of diamonds adorns the case (no easy feat either, given the density of ceramic), in unique clusters and patterns that bring illustration to the case.
Now, Richard Mille may be young in tenure, but it leans into the defining trait of any twenty-something: unpredictability, with surprises revealing themselves when you least expect them. That idea plays out quite literally here. Tilt each model to the side and the caseback – sandwiching the case – unveils a further scattering of stones, an unexpected detail that glistens within every angle.
The RM 07-01 Blush Pink combines diamonds with yellow and blue sapphires, while the RM 07-01 Powder Blue pairs diamonds with pink sapphires and tsavorites. Meanwhile, the RM 07-01 Lavender Pink reveals a vibrant interplay of diamonds, orange sapphires, and rubies.
Beyond the mirage of eccentricity, technical awe is just as present as aesthetics. Peering out from beyond the collage of shapes that falls front and centre, each dial is crafted on an in-house calibre that’s been skeletonised in grade 5 titanium, with a 50 hour power reserve. Translation: that means no hiding behind the language of design or the contours of colour, but articulating the dexterity of its engine in equal measure.
Suffice it to say, three is not a crowd here by any means, and the dreamlike universe and allure that these watches conjure – limited to 50 pieces each – means it’s difficult to share the love when you want all three.
