Richard Mille RM27-02, Tourbillon Rafael Nadal

Sold
Watchdrawer

The RM27-02 was the sixth watch created for and tested by the celebrated Spanish tennis player, Rafael Nadal. With an unusual unibody construction and experimental quartz-filament case, the watch is designed to withstand huge amounts of shock up to 5000 G’s and is resistant to high temperatures, while remaining light and comfortably wearable. A testament to Richard Mille’s dedication to innovative design and manufacture.

The origins of the brand

The watch industry had never seen anything like Richard Mille in 2001 – by which we mean the brand, with the RM 001 really shaking things up. The man himself, however, had been around the watch industry for over thirty years. Having taken various managerial positions at different companies, he was someone who knew the ins-and-outs of the industry and the market intimately.

However, horology wasn’t Mille’s first love. In fact, he waited five decades before starting his own brand. Prior to that, he was primarily obsessed with mechanics, more specifically motorcars and planes. It is said that he was so enamoured by sports cars that he bought his first one before he’d even received the money from his first paycheque. It was a Renault Alpine, in case you were wondering. According to Theodore Diehl, one of the very first employees of the brand and now its official spokesperson, Mille would read the Concorde instruction manuals as his bedtime reading, purely for the enjoyment of learning how the supersonic plane flew. It was this deep passion for mechanical brilliance that drove Mille in his career, constantly on the search for how to push the norm in order to achieve the unprecedented.