Richard Mille Watches

Whether you like Richard Mille or not—and it’s a hotly contested topic—you have to at least acknowledge that the avant-garde brand does things a little differently. Since the release of the 2001 RM001, Richard Mille has chosen to define the watches it makes by going down a different route to traditional Swiss watchmaking—and here are five things that particularly stand out.

If you decided to build a watch, a really good one with some kind of complication, where every last piece—up to and including the smallest screw—was custom-made just for it, how much would it cost? Thousands? Tens of thousands? It’s hard to say at a guess, but this much is true: the Richard Mille RM011, a flyback chronograph in rose gold, costs £100,000. Let’s find out why.

Richard Mille is no stranger to breaking records, and the latest watch by the brand to do so is the RM 50-03 McLaren F1; this highly complicated split second tourbillon watch weighs just 38 grams in total, including the strap. To put that in perspective, the entire timepiece weighs less than a golf ball. Considering what’s going on inside the watch, that’s a pretty impressive statistic.

In 1999, carmaker Pagani threw down the gauntlet for luxury goods. The Italian manufacturer forgot about restraints on creativity, ignored budget limits and time restrictions, and created a car to the designers’ dream specifications. No expense was spared in the production of the Zonda, a 6.0 litre V12 bespoke hypercar that was custom designed for ultimate luxury and performance—from the carbon chassis right down to the made-to-measure speedometer.