Soon the stars of the watchmaking runway will have nothing but the barest of bones to express themselves with. But these skeletons aren’t macabre; on the contrary, they offer vast areas of expression to the watchmakers who have managed to reinvent them.
While the art of skeletonization in watchmaking is very old, it underwent a renewal a decade ago with the arrival of new timepieces intended to rejuvenate this technique of stripping down mechanical movements. Principally purely decorative, skeletonization—or the art of hollowing out the bridges and plates of a movement—has not just changed with the introduction of new component manufacturing procedures; it has been completely transformed. The lase decade has given us a new demonstration of this, while confirming that skeleton movements are well and truly in vogue. To such an extent, in fact, that certain manufacturers who haven’t mastered this art have opted for openwork dials just so that they can give their watches the skeleton name…