Richard Mille & Pharrell Williams Collab And Release RM 52-05 Tourbillon - .@Richard_Mille

Richard Mille & Pharrell Williams Collab And Release RM 52-05 Tourbillon

Award-winning singer, songwriter, and producer Pharrell Williams has collaborated with watchmaker Richard Mille to create the RM 52-05 Tourbillon Pharrell Williams (US$969,000).

A longtime fan of the brand and of the TV series Star Trek (he named his record label Star Trak in homage), Williams, 46, drew on his lifelong fascination with the cosmos for inspiration. But true to his subversive form, he flipped the perspective, portraying a view of the Earth as reflected in the helmet visor of an astronaut standing on the surface of Mars.

“Creating is about shifting the perspective from which we look at things,” Williams said in a news release. “That’s really the only difference, and with the RM 52-05, we’ve looked at Mars from a different angle, an unexpected first-person point of view.”

The dial enlisted the expertise of masters in the decorative arts of engraving, enameling, and painting. The helmet is sculpted in grade 5 titanium and hand painted with a special extra-durable white paint. 

The astronaut’s Red Planet surroundings in the Valles Marineris, named for the Mariner 9 Probe Planet, are reflected in the visor with the blue Earth hovering above the horizon in the distance. The scene is painstakingly engraved on the curved red gold dial, a process that requires 15 hours per piece, followed by a full day of grand feu enameling superimposing layers of pigment repeatedly fired at 850 degrees celsius to achieve the color gradients from orange to red and blue to black.

Barrons

Richard Mille