Chopard's L.U.C Full Strike is one of the more serious minute repeaters made in-house anywhere, and for this year's Día de los Muertos the house has used it as the base for a single, unrepeatable dial. Reference 161947-5007 is a unique piece — a calavera skull assembled almost entirely from organic marquetry over the watch's openworked striking mechanism.
A skull in straw and eggshell
The dial starts from an 18-carat rose-gold base, hand-engraved and satin-finished, onto which more than 70 fragments of deep-blue rye straw are laid by hand to build the face of the skull. The straw is grown in France and split, dyed and placed one piece at a time, a technique Chopard's artisans have used before; what is new here is the eggshell. The eye sockets and the rows of teeth are rendered in eggshell marquetry, the first time the house has worked the material into an L.U.C dial, and its cracked, pale surface reads convincingly as bone against the blue. A hand-engraved gold moustache below carries a raised "L.U.Chopard" logo, and the minutes are tracked on a railway chapter engraved directly into the sapphire crystal.
The movement underneath
The skull sits over the L.U.C 08.01-L, the manually wound caliber that was the manufacture's first fully in-house minute repeater when it appeared in 2016. It measures 37.2mm by 7.97mm, with 533 components and 63 jewels, runs at 28,800 vibrations per hour and holds a 60-hour reserve, and it strikes on patented monobloc sapphire-crystal gongs rather than steel ones — a construction Chopard uses to project the chime through the case. The balance spring has a Phillips terminal curve; the hammers, strike wheels and governor are treated to a blue CVD finish, visible through the openworked dial; the bridges are maillechort with Côtes de Genève. The watch wears two power-reserve hands — one for the going train, one for the striking train — on a gilded Dauphine pair near two o'clock, and it carries the Poinçon de Genève.
One watch, price on request
The case is 42.5mm across and 11.55mm thick in 18-carat ethical rose gold, with a hand-engraved bezel, caseband and crown and a glare-proofed sapphire on both sides, on a hand-sewn cognac alligator strap with a rose-gold deployant clasp. Being a unique piece, it is offered at a price on request rather than a list figure. It is an easy watch to file under seasonal novelty, but the substance is in the pairing: one of the few fully in-house minute repeaters in the industry, finished to Geneva Seal standard, carrying a dial that is as much craft project as decoration.
Sources: Monochrome Watches and Chopard.
