A concept car is never about production, but is an exercise in intent and experimentation. By once again pairing up with automotive design house Zagato, Chopard adopts the same logic.
In the Chopard Lab One Zagato Concept, automotive thinking manifests itself as a wrist-scale experiment in architecture, weight and load-bearing design. It is a watch positioned alongside the brand’s haute horology offerings, riffing on Karl Friedrich Scheufele’s love of four-wheeled racing and taking the brand in a futurist direction.
At 43.2 grams including the strap, the Lab One Concept is the lightest titanium watch Chopard has ever produced, but its real achievement lies in how that weight has been engineered away in what appears to be a relentless quest for lightness. Developed with the Milanese coachbuilder Zagato, it is a collaboration between Karl-Friedrich Scheufele (Chopard Co-President), the Chopard design team, Andrea Michele Zagato (Zagato President) and Norihiko Harada (Zagato Chief Designer). It is the second concept watch bearing the Lab moniker since 2020’s Mille Miglia Lab One, and this 42mm watch is conceived as a structural object. Instead of being a case built to house a movement, consider it a framework that actively supports it, integrating it into its spaceframe design.
The idea begins with a chassis, actively inspired by Zagato’s tubular framework for racing cars, a hallmark of post-war coachbuilt racing cars. The new Chopard dispenses with traditional lugs, instead employing a visible network of cylindrical, web-like elements that function as part case structure, echoed in tubular, articulated lugs. These pivoting lugs allow the watch to adapt to the wrist while distributing stress across the frame, a solution borrowed directly from motorsport engineering.
Lab One is less about conventional ergonomics and more about a dynamic balance that sets a new skeletal tone, and a logic that continues inward. The movement, Chopard’s L.U.C 04.04-L, is not hidden but suspended, its bridges and mainplate rendered in ceramicised titanium and exposed as the dial surface, which itself adopts a stealth-like engine vibe. The familiar hierarchy of dial, hands and case is exposed in its micro-architectural parts, where structure becomes visible and integral to what Zagato would classify as the engine, the L.U.C 04.04-L movement. Zagato’s recurring “Z” motif is milled directly into the surface, with its monochrome geometry resembling the surface of a contemporary industrial building.
Ceramicised titanium is the material of choice, created through an electro-plasma oxidation process, and combining the lightness of titanium with a ceramic-like surface hardness. Its matte anthracite tone recalls automotive components designed to resist heat, abrasion and fatigue, rather than attract attention. This is not decorative materiality; it is functional colour, chosen for endurance.
The 42mm case is topped by a prominent ‘glass box’ sapphire crystal, a detail we usually see in vintage-inspired watches. Here it feels architectural, allowing for greater visibility to the open-worked assembly within. Turn the watch over and the same principle is applied to the caseback, maintaining visual symmetry while offering an unobstructed view of the movement’s mechanics.
Inside, the L.U.C 04.04-L movement is spare, monochrome and based on Chopard’s earlier Engine One calibre. It has a surprising tourbillon, and replaces verticality with radial order, aligning with the circular case while retaining automotive references: a power reserve rendered as a fuel gauge, shock absorbers modelled on silent blocks, and lever arms integrated into the caseband to stabilise the calibre under impact. Even the tourbillon bridge echoes a steering wheel’s spoke pattern, in a design twist that feels structurally justified.
This is not a watch designed for nostalgia. While Chopard’s long association with the Mille Miglia and classic motorsport underpins the collaboration, the Lab One Concept looks forward, not back. It is more closely aligned with experimental architecture and aerospace prototyping than with heritage-driven watchmaking.
Limited to just 19 pieces, this can be seen as a nod to Zagato’s founding year of 1919, and the Zagato Lab One Concept is unlikely to spawn a direct successor. Nor should it. Like the best concept cars, it is valuable for the questions it asks about material honesty, structural expression, and how far watchmaking can borrow from adjacent disciplines without losing its identity.
Here, Chopard doesn’t merely reference automotive design. It applies its principles. The result is a compact piece of wearable architecture, expressing itself as light, rigid, and unapologetically experimental.