Of all the collaborative projects I’ve made in the past decade, it is this watch, the Chopard L.U.C 1860 in Lucent Steel with untreated gold guilloché main dial, that I’m proudest of. Why? To begin with, I’ve always considered Chopard L.U.C to be one of the greatest unsung champions of truly authentic watchmaking in Switzerland. And I’ve always held the greatest admiration for the man behind Chopard L.U.C, my dear friend Karl-Friedrich Scheufele, for his unwavering devotion to quality and true functional innovation, embodied by the understated beauty of his watches. I’ve always believed that the 1860, the very first watch created by Scheufele and L.U.C, is one of the greatest men’s dress watches of all time.
Why do I love the Chopard L.U.C 1860 so much? For all the same reasons that I admire Scheufele. First, let’s talk about internal content… The in-house movement in the L.U.C 1860, the caliber 1.96, is to my mind the single greatest achievement in micro-rotor movements ever created. In the context of 1997, the fact that it was the world’s first bidirectional winding micro-rotor movement massively improving winding efficiency, and that it came with both COSC certification and the hallowed Geneva Seal was an absolute revelation. Says my dear friend Nick Foulkes, who is also the jury president of the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève (GPHG), “The caliber, a multidimensional connoisseur of everything from horology to art, to wine, to automobiles and even sausage dogs, he could hold a PhD-level dissertation on any of these subjects should he wish. But he is, like his 1860 watch, even more importantly the absolute paradigm of perfect manners and discreet elegance.
