Almost a quarter century ago, in the ultimate act of iconoclastic rebellion, Richard Mille smashed the watch industry apart at its seams and reconstructed it in his own image. Rejecting all references to the past, Mille shifted our perspective from a Proustian preoccupation of things past and set our sights decidedly on the new millennium. His watches were the very zeitgeist of contemporary culture, invoking the gods of horsepower, filling our ears with the magnificent dissonance of racing tyres shredded to their core, and our noses with the smell of high octane racing fuel.
Strapping on a Richard Mille watch was like being catapulted at light speed into the future. As our brains rapidly processed all his revolutionary philosophies encoded into these extraordinary objects, straddling the precious real estate of our wrists, we reached a sudden, life-changing, irreversible epiphany. What was once heavy, made in platinum or gold, he made light in deference to comfort and performance. The ultimate expression of this came when tennis legend Rafael Nadal strapped on a Mille watch over a
