’80s Ladies? Richard Mille Just Dropped 3 Bold New Watches Inspired by the Memphis Movement

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.

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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.

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