BEAUTY LIES WITHIN

What do car companies and watchmakers have in common? The art of skeletonisation

Car companies do a good line in less is more. Take Porsche – from the 968 Club Sport to the latest GT2 RS, there is a trusted formula. Strip it down, power it up, then sell a car with fewer bits for more money. The watch equivalent is the skeleton. Remove the dial, shave a load of metal from the movement, and you have a watch that is both more desirable and expensive.

The first skeletonised clocks appeared around 1760 and were the work of André Charles Caron, a Frenchman who was official clockmaker to Louis XV. This was an incredibly prestigious job at a time when the science of horology occupied some of the most brilliant minds in the world. In the 18th century, accurate timekeeping was the key to navigating the seas – very important when the Europeans were involved in an ongoing quest to conquer as much of the world as they could.

Marine chronometers didn’t need to look good, they just had to tell the time as precisely as possible, but back home in the Palace of Versailles, a bit of bling went a long way. So clockmakers like Caron were thinking up clever ways to make their handiwork more beautiful. It was under these spare-no-expense circumstances that skeletonisation was born, when a watchmaker could afford to spend countless hours carving any unnecessary bits from a movement to leave the bare bones exposed for all to admire.

Because it was such time-consuming work, skeleton movements did not catch on in any big numbers, and the art all but disappeared. Then in the Seventies, traditional watchmaking found itself backed into a corner by the arrival of cheaper and more reliable quartz. Instead of packing up and going home, the industry reinvented itself – mechanical watches could no longer tell time the best, but they could damn sure look good doing it.

High-end watchmakers like Patek Philippe and Jaeger-LeCoultre took polishing and decorating to new levels, and brought back skeletonisation as one of the ways to show off their best work. Making a skeleton watch by hand is still delicate work, but the concept of fanciest-foot-forward has led to it also being adopted by more entry-level brands, who do their own simpler version of skeletonisation, which generally involves removing the dial – or at least part – but making minimal alterations to the mechanism itself.