Chopard’s L.U.C Full Strike Día de los Muertos Edition 13 Turns a Minute Repeater Into Marquetry Art

Chopard’s L.U.C Full Strike has never been a quiet watch, even before its minute repeater begins to chime.

For the Día de los Muertos Edition 13, the manufacture has turned one of its most technically ambitious complications into a richly worked tribute to Mexican visual culture, using a calavera motif built from straw, eggshell and hand engraving.

It’s a unique piece in 18-carat ethical rose gold, and it shows how far contemporary métiers d’art watchmaking can go when decorative craft is treated with the same seriousness as mechanics.

At a glance

• Chopard has introduced the one-of-a-kind L.U.C Full Strike Día de los Muertos Edition 13.
• The dial depicts a calavera using deep-blue straw marquetry and eggshell marquetry, a first for Chopard.
• The 42.5mm ethical rose-gold minute repeater is priced upon request.

A calavera rendered in straw and eggshell

The dial is the centre of this edition, not simply because of its imagery, but because of the unusual craft behind it.

Built on a rose-gold base, the calavera is formed from more than 70 fragments of rye straw grown in France, each one split, shaped and positioned by hand.

The deep-blue straw creates the contours of the skull, while fine hand-executed chasing defines the outline and gives the composition its graphic sharpness.

Chopard has used eggshell marquetry here for the first time, applying it to the eye sockets and teeth of the calavera.

The process is exacting in a way that’s easy to underestimate, with each shell fragment cleaned, dried, broken and placed before the surface is lacquered and polished.

Around the eyes, the artisan varies the density of the eggshell to create a graduated effect, adding depth without relying on conventional gem-setting or painted shading.

A hand-engraved gold moustache carries a raised L.U.Chopard logo, a playful detail that sits within a dial otherwise framed by a peripheral minutes track.

The hours and minutes remain centrally displayed, while two concentric indicators at 2 o’clock show the remaining power reserve for both the movement and the striking mechanism.

The Full Strike calibre beneath the celebration

The artistic dial sits over Chopard’s manually wound L.U.C 08.01-L calibre, the manufacture’s first fully in-house minute repeater, introduced in 2016.

The movement comprises 533 components, runs at 28,800 vibrations per hour and provides a 60-hour power reserve.

It is partly visible from the dial side through an aperture on the left, and more fully through the exhibition caseback.

Chopard equips the calibre with five patented innovations designed to protect the repeater’s operation, including systems intended to prevent interruptions during chiming and to avoid interference when the repeater is activated.

For this edition, the hammers, strike ratchet wheels, bridge and repeater inertia governor drum receive a blue CVD treatment, echoing the colour of the straw marquetry on the dial.

The movement is finished to Poinçon de Genève standards, which places the watch firmly within Chopard’s high-watchmaking vocabulary rather than treating the decorated dial as the entire story.

Rose-gold engraving and a one-off finish

The case measures 42.5mm across and 11.55mm thick, with its architecture rendered in 18-carat ethical rose gold.

Chopard extends the ornament beyond the dial through hand engraving on the bezel, caseband, crown and exhibition caseback.

That decision matters because it makes the watch feel conceived as a single decorative object, rather than a complicated movement with an illustrated dial placed on top.

The watch is worn on a hand-sewn cognac-brown alligator leather strap with tone-on-tone lining, secured by a hand-engraved rose-gold deployant clasp.

Its predecessor from 2021 also explored the calavera motif, using champlevé with a blue lacquered skull, mother-of-pearl teeth and diamonds.

This new Edition 13 takes a more textural route, replacing brilliance with surface, grain and the irregular beauty of hand-placed natural material.

Details & Specifications

The L.U.C Full Strike Día de los Muertos Edition 13 is the sort of watch that will speak most clearly to collectors who value both complication and craft.

Its appeal lies in that tension between precision and imperfection, with a highly engineered repeater set against a dial made from fragile organic fragments placed entirely by hand.