TWEED de CHANEL

Inspiration has its landscapes. For Gabrielle Chanel, the gently rolling hills and valleys of Scotland, swept by wind and sun, filled with the murmur of natural springs and cloaked by night in velvety, star-studded blackness, were a whole new world.

These were the landscapes she discovered in the 1920s, during her love affair with the Duke of Westminster, when the life of the English aristocracy was opened up to her. Mademoiselle borrowed the Duke's tweed jackets and reinterpreted them in her collections. This warm, comfortable, woolly fabric, woven in countless different patterns by the Scots, was the softest armour to face the harshness of the Scottish climate.

Tweed owes its name to the River Tweed in the Scottish Borders. Gabrielle Chanel took it and made it her own, gifting its comfort to her elegant and sporty female clients. From it, one of the most essential features in the Chanel style vocabulary was born.

In 2020, tweed entered the world of Chanel jewellery. The first collection comprised of 45 exceptional pieces dedicated entirely to this fabric, reproducing its suppleness and subtleties through the skilful use of articulations.

Now for 2023, 'Tweed de Chanel", a new high jewellery collection, has been inspired by the richness of the tweed weaves and transforming tweed into a precious fabric. Though this collection, Patrice Leguéreau, Director of the Chanel Fine Jewellery Creation Studio, opened up a new chapter in Chanel High Jewellery. chanel.com

Returning to the magic of tweed for a second time, with the audacious creation of 64 new High Jewellery pieces: Patrice Leguéreau dreamt of creating a tweed set with precious stones.

Intricately crafted, embroidered, fringed, laced with openwork, playing on the refinements of monochromy or polychromy, reproducing the weave of the fabric with an abundance of details, creating an entrancing impression of movement, tweed reappears in its essence: as generous as it is precious.

This collection unveils five new tweed jewellery weaves, in five different colours and adorned with five icons dear to Gabrielle Chanel: the white ribbon, the pink camellia, the comet on a blue background, the yellow sun and the lion highlighted with flashes of red.

In five precious chapters, plastrons, necklaces and sautoirs, bracelets, brooches, rings and earrings re-create the charms of tweed, with each symbol represented either delicately within the clasp or present in full power on the piece.

Settings have been re-imagined in order to display the full beauty of the gemstones, using minuscule hinges, rings and articulations in gold and platinum threads that create suppleness into the structure of each creation. Airy and textured, the weave of the tweed is fringed and lightened; graphic and symmetrical, it is structured and enriched to create a veritable fabric of jewels. The interweaving of the gold, pearls and precious stones, the variety in the sizes of the stones, and the play of the openwork together re-create the fleecy, textured thickness of tweed. Its comfort and softness, meanwhile, are echoed in the work carried out specifically on the back of each piece.

Highlights of the collection include the Tweed Perle - a supple tweed ribbon intertwined with loops and pearls that can be worn as a brooch or as a pendant on chanel.com a chain; and Tweed Camelia - an icon in Gabrielle Chanel's style, the geometrical perfection of the camellia flower is etched in rose gold embroideries set with powder-pink and fuchsia sapphires against a textured weave.

The centrepiece of the collection is the Tweed Royal necklace. Intricately crafted, the yellow gold chain is set with diamonds and 37 magnificent rubies. The lion's head at the centre can be worn as a brooch or as a necklace on the plastron, while the stunning 10.17 carats D FL Type IIa pear-cut diamond that adorns it can be detached to be worn as a ring.