Or else look to the RM 65-01, a high-octane split-seconds chronograph inspired by motorsports, which recently received a Gen Z–friendly glow-up with versions in banana yellow, baby blue, or soft gray. The colored material has the lightness and feel of plastic, but is several times stronger than stainless steel.
For both firms, the collaboration has become a crucial calling card, such that a dedicated facility was opened at NTPT’s Lausanne headquarters in 2018, just for making Richard Mille watch cases. Behind the glass walls of this all-white inner sanctum, a big robotic printer shifts repeatedly back and forth along a large table, busily laying down precise strips of sticky-looking material on a spotless surface. Staff in white coveralls administer the machinery, while, to the rear, spools of see-through fibers feed mysteriously into equipment that will process them into micro-thin layers of “UD” (unidirectional tape), the stuff the machine is depositing.
For Richard Mille, color and texture actually turned out to be the by-product of a challenge the brand’s eponymous founder set NTPT more than a decade ago. The firm was already making Richard Mille watch cases out of its carbon-fiber variant, Carbon TPT, but Mille asked to brighten the template, says Thomassin. “He said he wanted a composite for a pure white case, so we started experimenting. We actually ended up with red first.”
Most fiber-based composites—think Kevlar, fiberglass, or forged carbon—share basic principles with materials such as concrete or MDF: Tiny strands of a given material are set within a binding matrix, usually a polymer resin, like epoxy. The mixture is shaped, compressed, and heat-cured. The resulting composite is typically very light and extremely strong, with the fibers serving as structural reinforcements to the surrounding matrix.
