SUSTAINABLE LUXURY PLAYS A STARRING ROLE

8th November 2018

Chopard has made more in roads into sustainable luxury than any other watch or jewellery brand. And things just got even more ethical. Words by Laura McCreddie-Doak.

Back in 2011, while attending Paris Fashion Week, the then-editor of Italian Vogue, Francesca Sozzani, took a moment to muse in her editor’s blog about what luxury meant having just attended the Dior and Lanvin shows.

“Luxury is research, the chance to experience new routes, to find new and not predictable or already seen solutions,” she said. “Experimentations are luxury.”

It seems as though watch and jewellery Maison Chopard working with this concept of luxury with its most recent commitment to using 100 per cent ethical gold in its watches and jewellery as of July 2018.

Chopard has been a pioneer in this field. Although there are smaller brands who use Fairmined gold, the big names have yet to adopt such an ethically rigorous approach.

“It started back in 2010 when we had our 150th anniversary of Chopard coming up and Caroline had designed a beautiful collection called Animal World,” explains Karl Friedrich Scheufele, co-president of the brand, at a press conference at Baselworld back in March. “We connected with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and then we realised that we were really not perfectly in line with sustainability.”

To address this the brand introduced Fairmined gold into the company in 2013, which was also the first year Chopard participated in the Green Carpet Challenge; an ethical fashion initiative aimed at changing what A-listers to wear on the red carpet, which was set up by Livia Firth, founder and creative director of Eco-Age, a specialist sustainability and communications consultancy. By 2014, the L.U.C Tourbillon QF Fairmined was launched. The case was made from gold mined by the Coodmilla Cooperative, which is located in the Nariño region of Colombia and which Chopard worked with to help them achieve Fairmined certification. Working with Eco-Age, Chopard committed to, what they termed, a Journey to Sustainable Luxury – a multi-year and ambitious programme of sustainable change that will set new environmental and social standards for jewellery and watchmaking.

This year sees its most ambitious step yet.

“I think we say we’re looking at our biggest milestone being that we are going to use 100 per cent ethical gold which is responsibly sourced either accredited by Responsible Jewellery Council (RJC) or by the Swiss Better Gold Association (SBGA), which we have been a part of since the end of last year,” explains Scheufele.

These radical developments have been possible thanks to a new partnership with Swiss gold refinery company PX Précinox, which was announced in 2015 and led to the establishing of the first commercial export route for Fairmined gold from Bolivia. Then in 2016, Chopard created unique partnership with Gemfields to ensure the traceability of its stones.

Although this is all incredibly inspirational, Karl Friedrich is keen to point out that the family nature of the business and its vertical structure has been integral.

“We should pay credit to the vertical integration that we have in our company, which really allowed this this to happen”, he says. “It started with my grandfather who convinced my father and me when I was still very young that we needed to have a foundry in house. It is part of our philosophy in our company to be independent and this foundry allows us to do what we do with Fairmined gold.”

Actress Julianne Moore, who has worn Chopard’s ethical creations on many of her red carpet appearances thinks this move to go 100 per cent ethical is sets Chopard apart from its competitors.

“What Chopard has done by taking the lead and sustainability has made their products so much more attractive than anybody else’s,” she says. “It makes a huge difference as a you know as an actress and on the red carpet to be in a position where I can choose things that have been ethically sourced.

“I don’t want to be wearing anything where a human being has been harmed and certainly, as a feminist in terms of supply chain, I want to make sure that every woman who’s worked along the way has been treated fairly. This gives me the opportunity to wear something and wear it responsibly.”

At a time when it feels as though the change in terms of ethical jewellery is coming from smaller brands, it is incredible to see such a storied and respected Maison as Chopard admitting it needs to changing and making the steps to do so.

If, as Sozzani believed, the luxurious is now defined by such qualities as research and experimentation, then this 100 per cent ethical version of Chopard must be absolute definition of luxury in the modern age.

Chopard is available online or at ROX Argyll Arcade.

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