Paint applied to a moving part, which is the hard bit.
The RM 68-01 is a collaboration with the French graffiti artist Cyril Kongo, and the conceit is more difficult than it sounds. The paint is applied by hand directly to the skeletonised bridges and the tourbillon cage components, in Richard Mille's workshop, using a miniature spray technique developed for the project. Every element has to stay within its mass and balance tolerance afterwards, because these are parts of a running movement rather than a canvas.
The result is that no two are identical. The colours land differently on each set of bridges, which is unusual even by Richard Mille standards, where series are small but consistent. The case is Carbon TPT, the layered carbon composite that gives the flanks their grain.
It was produced in a very short series, so this is a secondary-market search from the start, and the specific watch matters: what you are choosing is a particular arrangement of paint on a particular movement.
- Movement bridges hand-painted by Cyril Kongo, not transferred
- Manual-winding tourbillon with a skeletonised baseplate
- Carbon TPT case with the composite's characteristic grain
- Very short series; no two examples carry identical paintwork