Chopard Drops 4 Sparkling New Alpine Eagle Watches—Including One With a ‘Chameleon’ Dial
Chopard can ‘do’ quiet elegance when it wants to – but the Swiss manufacture’s watch collections are replete with bold, often whimsical reminders that the house is also a purveyor of high jewelry. And, dubbed Alpine Eagle Summit, the sub-group of pieces before you add some glittery flair to a collection that’s soared to giddy heights since its release four years ago.
These 41 mm new additions come in four combinations, all in 18-karat gold—which, as with all the maison‘s watch and jewelry creations since July 2018, has been ethically sourced—with gemstones set around the bezels in subtle color gradients. The dials all offer a nod to the Alpine geography: the spessartites around the rose gold piece (CHF 74,500, or around $82,175) surround a “Pink Dawn” dial which is designed to evoke memories of the Alpine sunrise; one of two white gold options (both CHF 82,000, or around $90,500) has tsavorites circled around a “Vals Grey” dial reminiscent of quartzite stone found in the Swiss canton of Graubünden; the yellow gold iteration (also CHF 82,000, or around $90,500) has a“Golden Peak” dial, named for an appellation 19th century scientist James David Forbes gave to a rocky summit within the Mont Blanc massif, and surrounded by pink sapphires (chosen over diamonds, Chopard says, because they interact with the surrounding light more discreetly).
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But, at the Alpine Eagle Summit launch—held in Chopard co-president Karl-Friedrich Scheufele’s Geneva wine cellar Le Caveau de Bacchus—the piece that attendees can’t wait to get their hands on (not to mention their smartphone torch beams) is the other piece in white gold, whose “Zinal Blue” dial (named after an Alpine glacier) shifts from blue to purple depending on its relationship to the beholder and the nearest light source. Reminiscent of how a Persian carpet changes hue depending on how light is interacting with the direction of the pile, The ‘Chameleon’ effect, as it became informally known at the unveiling, is a conspicuous “first” for the brand, and looks set to garner the most attention.
“Caroline-Marie [Scheufele, Karl-Friedrich’s daughter and Chopard’s Product Manager] called me in the middle of the night to tell me about it,” Karl-Friedrich tells Robb Report the following day, at the Chopard workshops. “We own a dial manufacturer, and when they showed it to her she immediately thought that this would be incredible to use on an Alpine Eagle. So it was her discovery.” Referring to the sapphires-over-diamonds sleight of hand, he adds: “I think the Alpine Eagle project amplified our attention to detail a great deal.” All the new pieces are non-gendered, while the beating heart within is the Chopard 01.15-C, whose precision settings are authenticated by chronometer certification.
For those late in the room, the story of the Alpine Eagle ‘family’ begins long before it came into being: and explains why the Chopard top brass insist on the word ‘family’ over ‘line’ or ‘collection’. In 1980, still in his early 20s, Karl-Friedrich persuaded his father Karl ScheufeleIII that the house, which the family had purchased in 1963, should craft a sporty, affordable piece in steel, suitable for his regular skiing exploits on the slopes of St Moritz. The resulting timepiece became a bestseller for around a decade, and set the precociously prescient Karl-Friedrich on the path to the position he holds now as co-president.
Just shy of four decades later, history repeated itself when Karl-Friedrich’s heir Karl-Fritz Scheufele approached his father about a new reinterpretation of the St. Moritz’s sporty aesthetics. “I said no at first,” Karl-Friedrich says, “because launching a new collection is a big investment in terms of product development, tools, communication. I said, ‘Look, we have to support other collections.’ Then Karl-Fritz brought presented some very good arguments—how we’d reached the time of integrated bracelets, how we had nothing like this in our collection. Then my father joined the discussion too. In the end, they convinced me to go ahead.”
What became known as the Alpine Eagle—the first ever instance, according to Karl-Friedrich, of three generations of Scheufeles working on the same concept—first came out in late 2019. Crafted from ultra-resistant Lucent Steel A223, its hereditary traits from the St Moritz included paired bezel screws and tripe-link bracelet, while thematic tributes to the raptor for which it is named (like the low-key references to vintage racecar dashboards in Chopard’s Mille Miglia models) were subtle: its textured dials and seconds hand counterweight resemble an eagle’s iris and a feather respectively. Including the XL Chrono Maritime Blue version released in October, there are now 44 Alpine Eagle models in the catalogue.
In keeping with Chopard’s philanthropic tendencies (the Elton John AIDS Foundation, Catalan tenor José Carreras’s Leukemia Foundation and UNICEF are among the organizations it has supported), the year of that original release Karl-Friedrich Scheufele, along with falconer Jacques-Olivier Travers and entrepreneur and activist Ronald Menzel, founded The Alpine Eagle Foundation. The reintroduction of white-tailed eagles to the plains of Lake Geneva is typical of its endeavors to preserve the biological diversity within a 190,000 km² high-altitude biotope spread across six countries.
“A family business, by definition, is not purely profit-driven: it’s a business that goes on into the next generation and of all future generations,” Karl-Friedrich explains of Chopard’s corporate responsibility ethos. “That makes you adhere to the sustainability side of things, because if you don’t worry about the next generation, then who cares about the steel we have introduced? Then it’s a different story. We care about all these things because we are a family-oriented company and we think that when Karl-Fritz is my age, hopefully the world will be a reasonably nice place to live. For this, we have to start preparing now.”
As for the Alpine Eagle watch family’s future, this is a narrative that has just begun. “We’ve really shown the directions we can take with the Alpine Eagle,” says Karl-Friedrich. “There’s the sporty direction obviously, then you have the haute horlogerie side with the flying tourbillon and the XPS. Then there’s the jewelry side of things, the technological side with the high-frequency movement… We’ve been scratching the surface but there’s a lot more that still can be done.”
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