Zenith’s Defy Skyline Chronograph Is Astoundingly Precise
Welcome to Dialed In, Esquire’s column bringing you horological happenings and the most essential news from the watch world.
The Swiss brand Zenith has a bumper 160th anniversary coming in 2025, but that doesn’t mean it’s going easy this year on the designers and engineers at its original home in Le Locle. A slew of new watches combine updated design with variations on the brand’s groundbreaking El Primero automatic movement—ticking away since 1969—inside. While many of the novelties at March’s Watches and Wonders show in Geneva were new offerings from the Chronosport line of timekeepers, another sporty milestone lay in the appearance of the first chronograph movement in the house’s Defy Skyline family.
In a satisfyingly untrendy 42mm, the new steel Skyline Chronograph has a great visual presence and a strong symmetry despite the date window at 4:30. The tapering steel bracelet echoes the faceted look of the case and bezel, which—for those whose fifth-grade geometry has slipped away—is a dodecagon. A navy-blue rubber strap is an optional extra. Most noticeable is the sunburst blue dial with its pattern of four-pointed stars, a throwback to the 1960s and the time of the El Primero’s creation, when the four-pointed star was Zenith’s logo. Fortunately, the sunburst is gratifyingly lacking in an excess of burst, which, to these eyes at least, often cheapens an otherwise beautiful watch with unnecessary glimmer.
Defy Skyline Chronograph
zenith-watches.com
$13400.00
Inside is a 36,000-vibration-per-hour (5 Hz) El Primero automatic movement with 60 hours of power reserve. The high frequency of the movement allows Zenith to incorporate its popular one-tenth-of-a-second chronograph counter, which whizzes around the dial at high speed to impress everyone in the pub. This is why, though you’d have to look very closely at the dial to spot it, the inner and outer seconds tracks are not aligned—the entire outer track is divided up into tenths of a second. Such precision is hardly going to change your life in any meaningful way, but it’s good to know that it’s there should you ever need it.
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