The Skeleton X, a new Manufacture movement that lays bare its audacious technology in an exquisite exhibition of fine watchmaking’s most challenging technique. Inner beauty revealed, not concealed: this openworked wonder takes skeletonization to the X-level. Bold and powerful, it is an X-ray interpretation of the future of watchmaking design, where we see everything, including the very architecture and functioning of time. If you’ve got it, flaunt it. The Skeleton X leaves nothing to the imagination.
More than a means, eXploring has become Ulysse Nardin’s motivation. The X-factor is the answer: X like an adventure, X like our deepest desires, X for the unknown, X for what’s forbidden, bold and exciting. Skeleton X is the perfect showcase of this new X-ray vision of watchmaking. Blurring the frontiers between our inner and the outer worlds, X-rays allow us to connect with the invisible, with the hidden. To see through things, to explore the in-betweens of the reality, to transgress the rules of the material world. The new Skeleton X plays off the transparency of its powerful movement by intricately cutting away as much material as possible, without jeopardizing tolerances or shock resistance, to reveal the stunning beauty of the three-dimensional heart beating inside.
The Skeleton X case reshaped and very small, a mere 42mm, is perfectly on-trend: more angular, more masculine, less round. Its shape-within-shape-within-shape geometry – an X formed by four of the indexes is framed in a rectangle, in turn inside a circle – delights the eye. Inside and clearly visible beats one of the star innovations of the watch’s antecedent, the Freak Vision: a super-light balance wheel in silicium, extra-wide, with nickel flyweights and stabilizing micro-blades. The new Manufacture movement, the UN-371 caliber, is based on the UN-171 movement, but completely redesigned. The 96-hour power reserve can be read through the back by means of windows, like those in the barrel. The Skeleton X eXists in four different satin-finish versions: satin-finish titanium blue, satin-finish titanium black, satin-finish rose gold or matte-finish Carbonium ® GOLD.
Painstakingly cut and exposed, elaborately finished, hand-polished to a shimmering gleam, it bespeaks the artisan’s touch, and watchmaker’s experience and savoir-faire. Nothing can hide, inside becomes outside, the boundaries blur, as the invisible processes of time are marvelously revealed to the naked eye.