Watchmaking is often mysterious—the craft of perfectly coordinated minutiae ticking away unseen. This year at Watches and Wonders, though, there were watches everywhere you looked that you could see through. Skeletonised watches are one of 2026’s biggest trends, and there were a range of dials and designs with a panoply of bone structures. From peekaboo gaps worked into compositions to amuse and beguile, to structure and artistry so refined it will cause you to pause and ponder how it’s possible.
Cartier has a winner in its new Crash Squelette. The Crash, with its warped shape said to be inspired by a car crash, is one of the Parisian house’s most idiosyncratic designs. It’s also one of the elusive and rarest. It’s certainly been skeletonised before, but this year Cartier introduces a twist. The Manufacture 1967 MC manual-winding movement inside is specially designed with hand-hammered bridges shaped like Roman numerals. All of its moving components have been condensed into as small a space as possible. The effect: the ruby-topped crown looks as though it has dragged and distorted (from the apocryphal crash) the insides of the watch with it, leaving behind openings you can literally look right through.
Zenith, meanwhile, is putting its prized El Primero chronograph movement on show. The El Primero, the world’s first high-frequency automatic chronograph calibre, is this watchmaker’s pride and joy. It’s a matter of mechanical mastery, which is now on show in a new line of Chronomaster Sport Skeleton models. The sapphire dial is subtly tinted with a gradient that emphasises the openworked architecture of the watch movement, with its three overlapping subdials in shades of grey, anthracite and blue.
The new Chronomaster Sport Skeleton is offered in four variations. Two in steel with green or black ceramic bezels that suit the sporty story of this design. But two more tell a more pointed story about mechanics as an aesthetic luxury. A model in rose gold with a black ceramic bezel on a rubber strap. The most precious, though, is a 10-piece limited edition in rose gold with a bezel set with 50 baguette-cut diamonds.
In contemporary haute horlogerie, chiming repeaters are a top-end complication meant to delight the sense of hearing. Originally conceived to tell time by sound before the invention of the electric light, minute repeaters have now become a sensorial luxury. H. Moser & Cie is taking the idea to a new height, with its new Endeavour Minute Repeater Cylindrical Tourbillon Skeleton, which is as much about hearing the ineffable minute repeater complication as it is about making it beautiful to behold.
To wit, the brand had to design the movement of the watch—in particular with its hammers and chimes—to maximise visibility, so that upon activating the repeater function, the wearer has the best seat in the house to see the chimes at work.
Hermès, meanwhile, has fully dedicated its watches of 2026 to the theme of ‘mysterious mechanisms’. Nearly every new model it introduced at Geneva bore some degree of skeletonisation, though its winner in style is certainly the Arceau Samarcande. It looks deceptively simple: the classic Arceau silhouette and equestrian stirrup-inspired lugs, as designed by Henri d’Origny in 1978. There is a little horse-shape cutout on the dial, which seems natural enough for the house of Hermès. That cutout, though, exposes the bones of the house’s new H1927 self-winding micro-rotor movement with a minute repeater function.
The horse motif is framed with diamonds, and the design and orientation of the movement underneath is playful. A blued steel screw where the horse’s eye would be, cased under a shaped Saint-Louis crystal dial. Its minute repeater function, though, is discreet and almost invisible save for the slide on the left side of the case. Serious, high-brow haute horlogerie engaging in a game of what is and isn’t seen, the equine symbol of the house drawing the eye and almost winking at its mysteries—delightful.
The June 2026 ‘Embody’ edition of Vogue Singapore is available online and on newsstands.
