Women Under the Influence: Richard Mille Drops the RM 07-04 Automatic Sport

As the poet Walt Whitman wrote in his 1855 poem “Song of Myself”:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

That’s how I feel about the marketing for “women’s watches.”

I don’t necessarily believe in the gendering of timepieces. I think very much along the lines as editor and co-founder of Watch Femme, Suzanne Wong, who has said: “What is a woman’s watch? It is a watch owned by a woman.”

Sometimes I want to wear a hulking mass of horology, and other times, I like a traditional “shrink and pink” ladies’ watch. I suspect that a lot of fellows also want smaller and brighter options. That’s why I’m over the moon about the new RM 07-04 Automatic Sport from Richard Mille, a collection of six compact and colorful timepieces.

Let’s take a look!

Not all women have the same wants and needs. Thiam, Ledecká, and Levchenko needed a lighter piece, according to Amanda Mille. Whereas Korda, Straus, and Laffite wanted something more versatile.

Of course, because they come from Richard Mille, these watches are already visually arresting. But to give wearers more choice, the RM 07-04 Automatic Sport comes in six colorful flavors: black for the Carbon TPT model and dark blue, creamy white, green, mauve, and salmon pink for the models with the Quartz TPT casing.
 

For female enthusiasts, it’s the high horology that makes the biggest impact. Each of these editions comes equipped with a skeletonized in-house CRMA8 calibre automatic movement with high shock resistance, meaning that it’s a sports watch you can actually wear while playing sports. Plus, this open-work display is fully integrated into the movement to allow the wearer to appreciate the inner workings of the mechanism.
 

One of the most impressive achievements of RM 07-04 Automatic Sport is the flange (the part inside a watch case that supports the movement). Here it has been worked as if it were part of the movement.

The rest of the movement wasn’t a walk in the park either. According to Salvador Arbona, Richard Mille’s Technical Director for Movement, “We had to resolve a threefold technical challenge: extreme skeletonization, integration of the case with the movement, and inclusion of an inverted function selector.”
 

The result uses titanium crosspieces that seamlessly connect to the openwork window of the function selector. It’s not only technologically brilliant, it is also visually satisfying.