The Edgiest Zenith Defy Skyline Yet: a Skeletonized Chronograph

For LVMH Watch Week 2025, Zenith isn't flooding its collections with new dial colors. No, it's continuing to carefully build out its Defy Skyline range by introducing two variants of a brand new configuration. You can get the brand's sporty Defy Skyline with a skeletonized dial or with a chronograph, but both together? Until now, you were out of luck. Combining these features results in the most stylistically aggressive member of the Skyline family yet, the Zenith Defy Skyline Chronograph Skeleton.

Zenith is among historic brands such as its LVMH corporate sibling TAG Heuer that clearly segments its personality into retro and resolutely modern offerings for different audiences. The Defy collection is your destination for the latter, though it's a broad family that itself is divided into sub-collections. It's where the brand's boldest and edgiest current watches live, such as you'll find in the Defy Extreme line, but it simultaneously hosts the small and very vintage-inspired Defy Revival models as well. It's also home to the Skyline, which sits somewhere in between.

The Defy Skyline was introduced in 2022 (alongside the Revival), and it quickly seemed to become the face of the Defy collection with a refined and comparatively restrained approach to the modern luxury sport watch. Now, the new model might be the edgiest looking Skyline yet, but we never said it was the Defy collection's edgiest watch, nor its only skeletonized chronograph. (Check out the Defy Extreme Jungle for a real eyeful.)

The Skyline skeletonized chronograph offers a comparable approach and aesthetic to that of the Extreme or indeed the Defy 21, but one notable difference is size. While each of those measures 44mm or 45mm, the Skyline comes in at a comparatively discrete 42mm. That's going to make it significantly more wearable for a whole lot of people, and it remains water-resistant to 100m. Automatic chronographs tend to be thick and we expect it to have the same measurements as the non-skeletonized models at 15.4mm.

And automatic chronographs are the core Zenith's identity. The brand's celebrated El Primero here takes the form of the 3600 with skeletonized plate and bridges as well as dial cutouts, offering its own take on the familiar, technical look of a skeletonized sport watch. The dial's skeletonization pattern references Zenith's vintage four-pointed star logo and offers peeks at various movement elements. You can, of course, also see more of the movement through the display caseback.

Previously Zenith has skeletonized its El Primero 21 movement for the Extreme and Defy 21 watches, but this might be the first time for the El Primero 3600 to get the skeletonization treatment since it was introduced in 2019, and this version is thus dubbed the 3600SK. In addition to its 60-hour power reserve and famously high-beat frequency of 5Hz, the 3600 movement has a particularly unique and captivating feature: its central chronograph hand whips around the dial in ten seconds (while the 3 o'clock subdial counts a full minute and the 6 o'clock subdial tracks up to an hour).

At launch, the Zenith Defy Skyline Chronograph Skeleton comes in black and blue dial variants. Note that the movements' bridges, plates, and rotor are matched to the dial color, and each models comes with a matching rubber strap in addition to its steel bracelet. Both versions have a price of USD 15,500.

To learn more, visit Zenith, here.