Fashion

A waterfall in the Black Forest set the whole thing in motion nearly five decades ago, when light scattering across its spray gave Chopard’s Karl and Karin Scheufele the idea of diamonds that could move freely rather than sit fixed in a setting. That image has now returned as the starting point for a new campaign marking fifty years of Happy Diamonds, with Chopard bringing together Bella Hadid, an ambassador for the house since 2024, and Liu Wen, newly named to the same role, to front a cinematic story built around movement, gesture and the particular kind of freedom the collection has always claimed as its own.

The campaign, embargoed until 11am in New York on 15 September, unveils two things at once. The first is a re-edition of the Happy Sport watch, a design that upended the codes of fine watchmaking in 1993 by setting diamonds against steel, a pairing considered close to provocative at the time. Happy Sport The First revives that original model in 26mm and 33mm sizes, built around a pebble-link bracelet inspired by stones smoothed by sea water and available in Lucent Steel, in a steel-and-gold combination, or entirely in ethical yellow gold. The dial carries either five or seven happy diamonds depending on the size, each one housed in its own gold capsule and left to drift between two anti-reflective sapphire crystals.

The second addition is a series of seven Happy Diamonds pendants, built on the rectangular silhouette the house introduced in 2006 and now reworked with softly bevelled edges and a wider interior cavity that gives the diamonds more room to shift with the wearer’s movement. Three compact versions run 16.5mm, three longer interpretations extend to 25.4mm, and the white gold editions across both sizes introduce a bevelled castle setting new to the collection, its structure drawing on the rhythm of architectural crenellations to let a line of diamonds appear almost suspended in the metal. A high jewellery pendant closes out the launch, extending to 49mm in ethical white gold and framed with trapeze and emerald-cut stones around a central row of seven happy diamonds.

Caroline Scheufele, Chopard’s Co-President and Artistic Director, traced the idea back to her own upbringing within the house, describing how the conviction that diamonds are happier when they are free was first voiced by her mother and has stayed with her through every reinterpretation since, adding that the new pieces were designed to give the diamonds even more room to move and to resonate with the person wearing them.
Behind the campaign’s imagery sits a team assembled around the theme of motion rather than stillness.

Director Manu Cossu built a series of films meant to carry a cinematic, almost old Hollywood aura, while choreographer Stephen Galloway, drawing on contemporary dance, shaped the body language on set frame by frame, describing the diamonds as having changed how he thought about movement altogether. Photographer Greg Williams shot the campaign’s stills, calling Hadid and Wen his two dream subjects for the way their contrasting energies, one expressive and bold, the other precise and understated, gave the images what he described as immediate authenticity.

The launch also carries forward Chopard’s sustainability commitments, with the new pieces produced in the house’s 100% ethical gold, a standard in place since 2018, and Lucent Steel, its proprietary recycled steel introduced in 2022. Fifty years on from that first prototype, the house is positioning the anniversary less as a reissue than as a continuation of the same founding idea, one it insists still speaks to a generation drawn to self-expression and to living fully in the moment.

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Images: Supplied