Chopard’s Sixfold Seduction: The Extraordinary Timepieces Courting GPHG Glory In 2026

Let us travel back in time to Sonvilier in 1860: a young artisan, barely 24, hunched over the intimate mechanics of time. His name is Louis-Ulysse Chopard, and in this quiet Swiss village he establishes a high-precision watchmaking workshop devoted to pocket watches and chronometers. 

His obsession is deceptively simple — reliability, accuracy and extraordinary thinness. Within a generation, those qualities carry Chopard far beyond the Jura, winning commissions from the Swiss railway and even Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. 

In 1937, the family relocates the company to Geneva, the historic capital of fine watchmaking, under Louis-Ulysse’s grandson Paul-André Chopard. 

Fast-forward 166 years and the name Chopard has become almost cinematic in its reach: a family-owned Swiss luxury maison where haute horlogerie, Haute Joaillerie, automotive passion and red-carpet glamour coexist with unusual fluency. 

There is the mischievous brilliance of Happy Diamonds, introduced in 1976; the precision-driven L.U.C universe born from Chopard Manufacture in Fleurier in the 1990s; and the enduring spectacle of Cannes, where Chopard has been an official partner since 1998 and Caroline Scheufele’s redesigned Palme d’Or has become an object of cinematic desire in its own right. 

Now, as the 2026 Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève approaches its 7 November ceremony, Chopard arrives with an unusually commanding six nominations across six categories — an intriguing snapshot of what contemporary luxury watchmaking can mean when engineering, jewellery and artistic craft refuse to remain in separate rooms. 

The GPHG, established in 2001 and administered since 2011 by a public-interest foundation, has spent more than two decades functioning as one of the industry’s most visible international showcases for horological creativity. Its importance lies not merely in trophies, but in the attention it concentrates upon the people, techniques and ideas behind exceptional watches — giving independent makers, established maisons and jewellery houses a global stage upon which craftsmanship itself becomes the protagonist. 

Chopard’s six contenders make a particularly persuasive case for breadth.

In Time Only, the L.U.C 1860 revisits the watch that inaugurated the L.U.C collection, itself now celebrating 30 years of Chopard Manufacture. Its 36.5mm Lucent Steel™ case, hand-guilloché “Areuse Blue” dial and chronometer-certified L.U.C Calibre 96.40-L articulate Chopard’s rare ability to make restraint feel sumptuous. 

Then comes the formidable L.U.C Grand Strike, nominated for Mechanical Exception. With 686 components, grande sonnerie, petite sonnerie and minute repeater functions, plus proprietary sapphire-crystal gongs, it represents the Maison’s most ambitious chiming watch to date — a natural descendant of the L.U.C Full Strike, which captured the GPHG’s Aiguille d’Or in 2017. 

In Gemset, L’Heure du Diamant demonstrates Chopard’s characteristic refusal to choose between watch and jewel: a cushion-shaped case, pear-shaped diamond bezel, fluted dial and sculptural gold bracelet reinterpret a Scheufele-era design language from the 1960s.

The Zagato Lab One Concept, nominated in Sport, takes another route entirely. Developed with Italian automotive design house Zagato, its 19-piece architecture combines ceramicised titanium with a tourbillon movement whose bridges and mainplate employ the same advanced material — Chopard’s motorsport vocabulary translated into haute horlogerie.

In Mechanical Clock, the Beehive Chiming Table Clock, created with L’Épée 1839, turns one of Chopard’s most resonant symbols — the beehive — into a richly ornamented mechanical Objet d’Art, marrying the poetry of collective craftsmanship with an animated striking mechanism.

And then, quite gloriously, there is the Mystery Nut Secret Watch, nominated in Jewellery: a one-of-a-kind pendant watch in 18-carat ethical rose gold and diamonds, sculpted to resemble a walnut and concealing a self-winding moon-phase movement. Suspended from a spectacular sautoir embellished with almost 430 carats of diamond briolettes, it is precisely the sort of deliciously extravagant proposition that reminds us why Chopard occupies such fascinating territory between jewellery, sculpture and watchmaking.

This breadth is hardly accidental. Chopard is vertically integrated and practises more than 50 crafts across its manufacturing sites, while Caroline Scheufele, Co-President and Artistic Director, remains a defining creative force behind its jewellery universe. 

Her instinct has helped propel Chopard from celebrated watchmaker to fully realised luxury maison, encompassing fine and high watchmaking, Haute Joaillerie and a sophisticated lifestyle universe. 

Perhaps that is the most compelling story behind these six nominations. They do not merely demonstrate what Chopard can make. They reveal what Chopard has become: a maison where precision can be seductive, engineering can be poetic, and extravagance can possess intellectual substance.

At the 2026 GPHG, Chopard is not simply presenting six watches and objects. It is presenting 166 years of accumulated savoir-faire — distilled, polished and spectacularly alive.

*Photos courtesy of Chopard.