Watchmaking today is often about looking through watches at exposed bridges, barrels, wheels and escapements. Modern skeleton, or openworked, watches have moved beyond the Swiss farmhouse baroque of the 1970s and ’80s, removing material to flaunt naked components.

The modern skeleton era began in the early 2000s with Richard Mille. Even the time-and-date RM67 is a multi-layered spectacle. In 2026, Patek Philippe demonstrated the style with its first grand complication for the sporty Cubitus: a square, self-winding perpetual calendar with openworked mainplate and bridges, plus a slatted, shutter-like skeleton dial.

Elsewhere, Zenith unveiled an openworked El Primero visible through a fumé sapphire dial. Philippe Delhotal at Hermès said the H08 skeleton forms the watch’s structure, creating a robust sporty watch rather than the lightest or thinnest. Hublot’s Big Bang Reloaded similarly amplifies the calibre’s architecture, while Chopard’s Karl-Friedrich Scheufele says many modern skeletons are more like openwork.

Not every openworked dial is skeletonised: purists reserve the term for movements from which all non-essential material has been trimmed. Audemars Piguet celebrates this manual process with its capsule collection Les Établisseurs, including the pocket-watch-to-table-clock Établisseurs Nomade.