Happy Hours

Chopard’s latest Happy Diamonds campaign pairs dancing gems with Julia Roberts’s million-dollar smile for a match made in joie de vivre heaven. By Charmaine Ho.

- Elizabeth Stewart

In 1993, Chopard Co-President and Artistic Director Caroline Scheufele unveiled a watch that would soon prove to be one of the brand’s most emblematic, if not most beloved, designs: The Happy Sport, which did the unimaginable by teaming glittering diamonds with humble steel (instead of the usual precious metal) for a combination that’s so popular today but completely unheard of then. “I wanted a watch that I could wear all day long: At the gym, in the office, or for a dinner in town,” Scheufele said upon its launch, giving voice to a desire similarly shared by countless women across the globe.

Promising sophisticated luxury and casual-chic style in equal measure, the timepiece offered women the best of both worlds at a time when their only choices were a dressy occasion watch or a practical everyday model. Further securing the watch’s success was its uncanny ability to spark instant joy in anyone who chanced upon it, thanks to the seven mobile diamonds that dance and twirl freely across its face with gleeful abandon.