In under thirty years, the watchmaker has become a star player, with a publicity policy linked with the Cannes Film Festival, where it has mounted the steps one by one all the way up to the Palme d’Or: its own design.
Ultra-glamorous media coverage has contributed to the rising prices of Chopard's jewelry at auction, where bids regularly top its high estimates, like this "Chopardissimo" pendant, knocked down on June 20, 2017, by Tajan at the Hôtel Drouot for €5,200: over €1,000 more than was hoped. To start with, Chopard was a small clock-making business created in 1860, which used to equip the Swiss railway company and supplied fine timepieces exported all over Europe before the war. Then the company gradually declined, until its happy union with German goldsmith and jeweler Karl Scheufele III in the 1960s. The resulting additional know-how enabled the firm to cash in on Sixties trends, producing an explosion of colours with watch faces in hard stone, coral, lapis lazuli, turquoise, and tiger's eye. Yellow gold reigned supreme and forms became liberated, with giant ovals, circles, braided cuffs and kinetic mosaics: a sunny,…
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