Why these sweet treats from Richard Mille will have you salivating
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Why these sweet treats from Richard Mille will take you salivating
Who wants candy? We do, if they're anything similar Richard Mille's Bonbon collection. Merely don't exist fooled by saccharine appearances; the craftmanship that goes into the making of these sugary delights is anything but a piece of block.
The Richard Mille RM 07-03 Cupcake and RM 07-03 Marshmallow. (Photograph: Richard Mille)
12 Apr 2022 06:30AM (Updated: 04 Jul 2022 04:37PM)
If the first thought you had when seeing the new Richard Mille Bonbon collection was "are they taking the piss?", nosotros can't blame yous. Last year, the brand unveiled a watch that had such an innovative crystal structure that it could (theoretically) survive being trampled by horses on a polo field; and the yr before that, the globe's lightest split-seconds chronograph with a tourbillon, that they were confident enough to just casually fling across a room full of journalists.
This year'south drove, however, is inspired past fruits and sweets. Taken at face value, the reply to the question "are they taking the piss?" is a resounding "yes". The watches in the Bonbon collection may look colourful and sweet, but the brunt that they put on the wallet is as serious and sinful as one would expect of a Richard Mille.
So, who then, are the clients for these watches? Is it the collector who, holding a middle finger up to the earth, uses the watches as a #baller style of saying "I've got too much cash!"? Or is it the enthusiast who pays the hefty asking cost for a Richard Mille because he/she understands what the brand has and still stands for: A combination of technical innovation and daring creativity that defy expectations of what a mechanical watch is supposed to be?
Judging by the aesthetics solitary, it'due south hard to see how the watches are meant for the latter. But as you inspect the watches closer, you'll commencement to see that details on the sentry are hardly simple recreations of fruit and sweets. No, these are not painted resin equally you lot would find on Japanese Sampuru (food replicas); these are stamped titanium and Grand Feu enamels within carbon/quartz TPT cases that Richard Mille has put together with painstaking detail.
The brainchild of this exuberant collection was Cecile Guenat, the brand's Artistic Manager. In his explanation of the drove, he said, "Bonbon – just saying the word is enough to make you lot smile." Nosotros call up this is quite telling of what he imagined the collection to be, and in all fairness, after taking 18 months to develop, most of those who got to collaborate with the watches at SIHH 2022 did but that – smiling.
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The drove consists of just ten dissimilar references, each of which is produced in an extremely small batch of 30 pieces each. However, even with such a small number of models, Richard Mille had to develop a palette of 60 colours to make the drove work. Hardly surprising, considering the technical sheet for these watches reads more like a receipt from a pick-and-mix candy store rather than an Haute Horlogerie industry.
For instance, the RM 16-01 Fraise consists of the following:
sixteen Candies
ii Sour ribbons
2 Lemon wedge candies
2 Orange wedge candies
3 Lollipops
5 Square liquorices
ane Round liquorice
1 Marshmallow
Within the Bonbon drove, the watches are carve up into 2 veins. Half-dozen of these references are housed within the Fruits line that sees a duo of watches within the respective RM 07-03, RM 37-01 and RM 16-01 cases. Each of these cases offer bezels carved from blocks of Carbon TPT followed past a burst of color thanks to their layered, Quartz TPT cases.
In the case of the RM 07-03 Myrtille, Richard Mille even debuted a new turquoise colour. If you're thinking "Well, it's just different colours, how difficult can that exist to make?" Aurele Vuilleumier, R&D Director at Richard Mille explained: "Every new colour is the result of innumerable tests. We utilize prepreg quartz filaments (quartz filaments pre-impregnated with a resin) to observe interactions betwixt the constituents and the resin. We evaluate the visual appearance after firing. A new colour takes a twelvemonth of development to perfect before information technology can be used."
The vi references within the Fruits Line are adorned with 8, 12 or xvi miniature candies similar gumdrops, swirling gelato, marshmallows or barley sugars; and between the 180 watches in this express edition line, over 3,000 tiny candies had to be made. In true Richard Mille way, these candies were machined from sheets of solid titanium and are then entirely hand-painted to resemble how these candies would expect like, not to adults, simply to children. Utterly irresistible.
Then in that location's the Sweets line, which consists of Sucette, Cupcake, Reglisse and Marshmallow. The watches offer a two-tone ceramic case with a surface texture that looks creamy, nearly melt-in-your-mouth. The ties to Haute Horlogerie come with the dials, which were fabricated with 1 of the almost respected artisanal technique in watchmaking – Grand Feu enamel.
Like making stone processed or tempering chocolate, Grand Feu enamelling is all most decision-making the temperature. Just instead of working effectually the lower range, Grand Feu (Big Fire in French) enamel requires extremely high firing temperatures, around 800°C. Getting a Grand Feu enamel punch whittled downwards to a flat texture is catchy enough, but what Richard Mille has managed to achieve with the RM 07-03 Marshmallow is a light and fluffy surface matching the existent world texture of the eponymous sweet treat.
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