Introducing the Bell & Ross BR 05 Skeleton Golden

Where some skeleton watches create a more intricate, delicate, or even airy feeling to a watch, the BR 05 Skeleton Golden’s combination of exposed mechanism, color, and structured case and bezel results in a somewhat industrial aesthetic. While this is not the first time Bell & Ross has paired a clear and colorful dial with the skeletonized movement, it is somehow even more impactful with this iteration. The hands and indices float above a halcyon landscape of warm, bronzy gold crystal. The calibre BR-CAL.322 automatic movement (based on the Sellita SW300-1 a) having been painstakingly excavated to create the latticed structure, is framed within this gloaming window like the portrait of urban scaffolding captured through the sepia-toned filter of a camera lens.

The orbicular dial, framed with a concave, golden brushed rehaut, is positioned in diametric opposition to the almost brutalist square bezel, beset by four symmetrically angled screws, itself standing upon a slightly more contoured square midcase. A heavily tapered, blocky steel bracelet of complementary satin and polished finishing cascades uninterrupted to a folding steel clasp.

At what point does design stop being comparative and begin to stand on its own? Though it is frequently our immediate reflex to understand something by way of comparison, it is often to the disservice of the thing itself. Moreover, this impulse also limits our own understanding and, in turn, appreciation of that which we are trying to analyze. This is human nature. We all too often choose to relegate a watch to an analysis by way of reference, only seeing it through the lens of those pieces which came before it. We can isolate the watch, put it in a glass of analytical formaldehyde and attempt to understand it in isolation and without perspective – or, in a more nuanced approach, attempt to see it within the context of the wider market and as a response to an aesthetic idea but articulated in the dialect of its own brand.