Rising out of the middle of this watch, sculpted in gold and caught mid-gesture, is a hand throwing the sign of the horns, the raised index and little finger that every rock-and-roll crowd in the world throws back at the stage. It is cheeky, irreverent, and completely unexpected on an object of serious haute horlogerie, and that is exactly the point. The Richard Mille RM 66 takes the attitude of rock and roll, the raised fist of rebellion and celebration, and renders it as a tiny three-dimensional sculpture floating at the heart of one of the most sophisticated watches in the world. Fine watchmaking almost never has a sense of humour or an edge of rebellion; this watch has both, and it wears them openly.
The hand itself is a genuine feat of the goldsmith's and engraver's art. It is not a flat image but a fully three-dimensional sculpture, modelled in the round with real anatomical detail, the raised fingers, the folded ones, the knuckles and tendons, even a tiny skull ring on one finger, all hand-finished in gold and set so that it rises up out of the mechanism rather than sitting on a dial. Sculpting a figure this small in three dimensions, finishing it by hand, and then integrating it into the architecture of a working movement without disturbing the watch's function is extraordinarily difficult, a marriage of jewellery sculpture and precision engineering, and it turns the dial into a stage on which that single defiant gesture is forever frozen.
And the hand is not merely decoration; it is wrapped around real mechanical theatre, because this is a flying tourbillon. A tourbillon mounts the escapement, the beating heart of the watch, inside a cage that turns continuously so that the small errors gravity introduces in any one position are averaged away as the cage carries it through them all. The flying kind, which this is, dispenses with the upper bridge that normally steadies the cage, supporting it only from beneath so that it appears to float, spinning free and unobstructed. Here that floating tourbillon turns in the open among the gold fingers and the skeletonised bridges, the whole mechanism laid bare so you can watch it work, the sculpture and the machine sharing the same small, dramatic space.
The case is where this particular example reaches a further extreme, because it is made of sapphire. Not a sapphire crystal over a metal case, but a whole case carved from solid blocks of sapphire, the transparent crystalline form of corundum, a material second only to diamond in hardness. That hardness is precisely what makes it so difficult to work: a sapphire case cannot be cut or stamped like metal but must be ground and machined with diamond tooling over hundreds of hours, each component slowly abraded into the complex curved shape of Richard Mille's tonneau case and then polished to flawless clarity, with a staggering rate of failure along the way. The reward is a case of total transparency, so clear that the watch seems barely to be there at all, the mechanism and the gold hand suspended as if in a block of ice or glass, light passing straight through from every side. A sapphire case is among the rarest and most demanding things in all of watchmaking, and it makes this already theatrical watch almost magical, a floating sculpture you can see from every angle.
Everything is built in the unmistakable Richard Mille idiom. The case is the brand's curved tonneau shape, following the wrist, assembled in three parts and held together by the ring of spline screws around the bezel, the construction engineered as armour for the movement within even when rendered in transparent crystal. The movement is skeletonised until almost nothing but structure remains, and the whole watch is engineered to be worn and even worn hard, light and tough despite its complication and its delicacy. Finished on a blue rubber strap that glows against the clear case, and made in the tiniest of limited editions, it is a watch produced in numbers small enough to make each one a genuine rarity.
What ties it all together is the philosophy behind it. Richard Mille built its name on bringing the attitude and materials of motor racing and extreme sport into watchmaking, on refusing the stuffiness of tradition while exceeding its technical standards, and the RM 66 is that spirit taken to its most playful and most daring. It says that a flying tourbillon, one of the summit complications, can share a dial with a rock-and-roll hand gesture; that a watch can be deadly serious in its engineering and gleefully rebellious in its character at the same time; and that the case holding it all can be made of something as improbable and difficult as solid transparent sapphire.
That is what makes this RM 66 so special. It fuses a genuine grand complication, a floating flying tourbillon, with a three-dimensional sculpture of the universal gesture of rock and roll, hand-modelled in gold and rising from the heart of the mechanism, and it suspends the whole irreverent spectacle inside a case carved from solid sapphire so clear the watch seems to float on the wrist. Serious and playful, delicate and tough, traditional in craft and utterly rebellious in spirit, it is watchmaking with its fist raised, and it wears that attitude with total, transparent confidence.
