Chanel’s Wearable Coromandels: A First Look at the House’s New High Jewelry Collection
In the days preceding the haute couture collections, some of the Place Vendôme’s biggest names begin showing creations to their most loyal clients. On Friday, Chanel opens the season with a collection based entirely on Gabrielle Chanel’s beloved Coromandel screens—a first for the house.
Whenever she moved house, from the chic 16th Arrondissement to the Ritz Paris (and, later, Switzerland), Gabrielle Chanel took her Coromandel screens with her to “upholster” her home. “I’m like a snail. I carry my house with me,” she once remarked to Claude Delay, her friend and biographer. At one point, she owned more than 30. But her most beloved pieces, the ones she kept all her life and considered the doors to her private world, were the 17th- and 18th-century Coromandel folding screens she picked up in 1910 with the great love of her life, Boy Capel. Today, these ornate, opulent black lacquer screens adorn the salons of private apartments at 31 Rue Cambon.
Chanel jewelry presentations have offered up a handful of Coromandel moments in the past several years, starting with the Mademoiselle Privé jewelry watch collection in 2012. In the next two years, it reemerged on a handful of jewels in the Jardin de Camélias collection. This year, however, marks the first time that decorative screens take center stage.
Semi-figurative floral “calligraphy,” stylized landscapes, Asian bestiaries, and even a small lacquer box are just some of the highlights in the Coromandel Collection, which debuts exclusively here. The important Horizon Lointain (“far horizon”) openwork choker reprises selected Coromandel motifs—clouds, mountains, camellias—in yellow gold, platinum, diamonds and mother-of-pearl. The Calligraphie Florale cuff is striking both for its composition in white gold, white and brownish diamonds, pink sapphires, black spinets, and tsavorite garnets as for its handling of negative space.
Meanwhile, the remarkable, articulated Recto Verso double-sided bracelet—panels of white and yellow gold and colored sapphires on one side; onyx and white and yellow diamonds and yellow sapphires on the other—is depicted here in gouache form because it will only just emerge from the workshops in time for the first client previews tomorrow.
