The ultimate stripped back, slimmed down, streamlined, featherlight watch, Richard Mille’s new RM 55-01 Manual Winding is a masterpiece of minimalism. It’s yet another demonstration that the endlessly creative Swiss luxury watchmaker is all about the new – constantly pushing back the boundaries of horological aesthetics, but also exploring fresh technological territory to drive watchmaking to places it’s never been before.

Here, both technology and aesthetics are deployed in the service of lightness and simplicity, making the watch incredibly comfortable on the wrist. The new Calibre RMUL4 that ticks away at the heart of the watch, for example, barely troubles the scales, weighing in at under 5g. It achieves this principally through the use of sanded and treated grade 5 titanium for the baseplate and three bridges. Comprising mostly titanium with small amounts of aluminium and vanadium, the alloy, commonly used in the aerospace industry, takes the incredible strength and lightness of titanium, and adds even more robust corrosion resistance.

This airiest of movements is clearly visible through the watch’s fully skeletonised dial – pared back to the essentials for maximum lightness and comfort, like everything else on the RM 55-01 Manual Winding. That’s also why the watch comes equipped with that manual winding system: it removes the oscillating weight that powers automatic watches, saving grams and allowing more light to pass through the movement.

The RM 55-01 Manual Winding comes in three versions, one in Carbon TPT and two in Quartz TPT, in white and grey. These remarkable materials, which Richard Mille deploys across a host of its watches – including the RM 30-01 – are made by stacking numerous ultra-thin carbon fibre filaments. As well as giving them their distinctive wood grain-like appearance, the process makes them incredibly tough and scratch-resistant – and, again, incredibly light.

The RM 55-01 Manual Winding is unmistakably a sports watch – one that builds on Richard Mille’s heritage of taking inspiration from and working alongside teams, organisations and stars, in high performance sports ranging from motorsport and yachting to football, tennis and golf; in fact, the watch’s most obvious predecessor is the similarly numbered RM 055 Bubba Watson, which was specifically engineered for the challenges of elite golf. But here, with a watch that removes everything inessential to achieve new levels of lightness and minimalism, that commitment to supreme performance and wearability under extreme conditions is taken to an entirely new place.