The RM HJ-02 In-House Automatic Tourbillon, Richard Mille’s Ode to Women

Behold Richard Mille’s tribute to women.

Some watches tell the time. Others tell you something about the person wearing them. The RM HJ-02 In-House Automatic Tourbillon, Richard Mille’s latest chapter in high jewellery, belongs firmly to the latter. And it makes its case with 1,399 stones and a level of technical nerve that few brands would attempt twice.

Twelve one-off watches. Twenty years of intent. Richard Mille celebrates two decades of women’s watchmaking with a collection that treats colour like engineering.

The RM HJ-02 In-House Automatic Tourbillon lets colour and its array of stones do the talking. Twelve unique pieces, sorted into pink, violet, blue and green universes, each one governed by the geometry of its stones rather than a template imposed on top of them. Snow-setting, grain-setting, bezel-setting: the techniques do the structural work usually left to metal alone.

Bejewelled Engineering

What sets this collection apart from a merely decorative approach is where the gem-setting stops. It doesn’t. The CRMT2 calibre, entirely new and built in-house, carries a gem-set white gold baseplate and a gold rotor that turns a functional part into a genuinely expressive one.

The fast-rotating barrel and variable-inertia tourbillon remain visible and legible through the stonework rather than buried beneath it. Richard Mille’s gem-setting team, already known for precision, was pushed into more experimental territory here, and the case, with its broken planes and asymmetrical cuts drawn loosely from Art Deco, took over a year on its own to resolve.

This is a watch for a woman who already owns beautiful things and is no longer interested in the obvious ones. She likely has a point of view on architecture, or a favourite decade of jewellery design she can defend at length over dinner. She wants proof that craft and colour can share the same sentence without one diminishing the other. The RM HJ-02 offers exactly that proof, worn quietly on the wrist rather than announced.

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