Chanel Designs History

“In the past, jewellery came from a drawing. (…) My jewellery came from an idea! I wanted to cover women in constellations. Stars! Stars of all sizes to sparkle in the hair, fringes, crescent moons. See these comets where the head glitters on a shoulder and the sparkling tail slips behind the shoulders to fall back down in a shower of stars on the chest...”

Response to an Interview «Le luxe de Paris contre le chômage» in L’Intransigeant of October 26, 1932, Gabrielle Chanel.

ALLURE CÉLESTE NECKLACE

Ninety years ago, Gabrielle Chanel created “Bijoux de Diamants”, the world’s first High Jewellery collection. In this sumptuous collection, she applied a fundamental principle to all her jewellery creations: giving women’s bodies freedom and adorning them at the same time.

It had been three years since life had been put on hold, when Black Thursday in 1929, pushed the world into the dark years of the Great Depression and when the exuberant growth of the 1920s had faded to vague feelings of nostalgia. Sombre times, overshadowed by the economic slump and inflation, combined with collapsing consumer demand and soaring unemployment, making 1932 the ideal time to break new ground and make room for hope and renewal.

Without shadows there can be no light, and from the start of that year a series of dazzling events had unfolded, casting their spells over a time of crisis. Elwyn Dirats and Jacques Auxenfants launched the Hot Club de France, spreading the swinging sound of jazz onto the rest of the world. The gilded stuccos of the Opéra Garnier looked on as Un Jardin sur l’Oronte sprang to life under the direction of Philippe Gaubert. A throng of 200,000 people witnessed the long-awaited launch of the ocean liner SS Normandie; and in November, the London Diamond Corporation revealed an inspiring idea for restoring the diamond market to its former luster.

The London Diamond Corporation turned to a woman, a visionary accessories designer, who applied the same modern design principles to clothes. A woman with a brilliant mind, whose costume jewellery had recently been lauded by the international press as even lovelier than the real thing. A woman of power, head of a multi-faceted empire that was growing by the day. A woman who was a friend of the arts and artists, the beating heart of her era. A woman who conjured women’s fate, their bodies and their way of life, on both sides of the Atlantic. The woman they chose to breathe new life into diamonds was Gabrielle Chanel.

Tired of the doom and gloom, she chose the possibility of dreams and the vitality of beauty. Mademoiselle created “Bijoux de Diamants”, the first High Jewellery collection in history. It boosted the Diamond Corporation’s shares within two days, transformed an entire industry, and revitalized her era.

“My stars! How could anything be more becoming or more eternally modern?” Gabrielle Chanel

It is said that Mademoiselle nurtured her determined pursuit of rigor and purity from her childhood in Aubazine. The Cistercian abbey bathing in the light of the Corrèze sky would be a source of inexhaustible energy and eternal inspiration for her. For example, the sun-lit corridor paved in mosaics of the sun, crescent moons and five-point stars, which had been treaded on for centuries.

While she had always counted on the semi-magical power of symbols, Coco would learn to believe in signs when she met Boy Capel, which would become a love affair between two people prepared to turn life on its head and transform it into an elevated experience.

A summer’s night in Paris. The weather still warm and the sky inky black if not for the shooting stars, a jet-black canvas illumined by the halo of a crescent moon. Sparkling like floating diamonds, the stars were to inspire the event that was to be the foundation for all Chanel High Jewellery. As she gazed up at the stars shining in the great extent of the sky, Mademoiselle decided to cover women’s skin and hair with showers of meteorites, with glowing crescent moons and flaming suns. “Bijoux de Diamants”, the epitome of her love for the irresistible radiance of beauty and life.

Far more than the name suggests, “Bijoux de Diamants” was a collection that was dazzling and opulent. About fifty pieces in white and yellow diamonds set in platinum as well as yellow gold, created for everyday wear were shining with a purity of light. Among the pieces that have been identified, 22 can draw a map of the sky covered with as many comets, moons and suns. Mademoiselle also imagined 17 optical illusions reproducing the suppleness of ribbon bows, dancing fringes and airy feathers, while a further 8 pieces explored the graphic purity of spirals, circles, squares, and crosses. Important shapes that were to prove rich in inspiration, and would gradually release its secrets over centuries to come. Testimonies describe monumental brooches in the shape of the numbers 3, 5 and 7, of which no trace has yet been found. In 2012, however, a documentary shot by Pathé Gaumont was rediscovered. It was broadcasted alongside newsreels in cinemas throughout France at the time. It featured a selection of the pieces from the exhibition and was filmed in Gabrielle Chanel’s private townhouse at 29 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

An unmissable glimpse into the world of a woman who clearly did nothing like anyone else and everything before anyone else. The film highlights two pieces in gold and yellow diamonds - long before the 1960s Fashion - that expressed Coco’s love of the sun and its vital force. A fine gold spiral wrapped around the finger with a yellow diamond perched on top, echoing the small yellow topaz ring that was the talisman of Mademoiselle born under the blazing August sun; and a sun brooch made extraordinarily precious by a multitude of yellow diamonds.

Because she applied the same modern principles to her jewellery as to her couture designs, Mademoiselle thought of jewellery as a new idea, establishing a new relationship between jewellery and the body. While “Bijoux de Diamants” was the first collection of its kind, it was first and foremost a collection designed with women in mind. Women with a strong place in life and the world, whose femininity was in perpetual motion, for whom Coco would design pieces without clasps that never impeded the freedom of their movements.

“I detest clasps! I’ve done away with clasps! Yet my jewellery is transformable.” Gabrielle Chanel

For what could be more of an affront to jewellers than the choice of a mere couturière - a dressmaker - to relaunch the diamond market? The London Diamond Corporation’s announcement caused an immediate flap in Place Vendôme, as “Bijoux de Diamants” was transformed into the “Chanel Affair”. An entire profession joined forces to prevent Gabrielle Chanel from making jewellery. An entire profession demanded that the jewellery should be dismantled and the stones returned. But since some sales had already been made on the first day, a few of the pieces survive to this day to bear witness to the collection. A midnight-blue case lined with tone-on-tone silk and holding a fragment of star-studded night in the form of a comet brooch in platinum and 7.8-carat diamonds. Or a long and astonishingly flexible feather, which may be pinned to a bodice or used to buckle a coat like a belt, to circle the forehead with a halo of light, or to embrace the curve of the shoulder thanks to a setting that was a technical triumph.

Pushing the boundaries of jewellery was one achievement. Pursuing the reinvention of the genre to the point of its entire state of existence in the world was another. In her presentation of “Bijoux de Diamants”, Mademoiselle left nothing to chance. The jewellery was displayed from November 7 to 19 in an exhibition of a kind that had never been seen before, preceded by a two-day private view that was thronged by the international press and high society. And the timing - at a season when everyone was looking for the perfect gift for end-of-year celebrations - was perfectly calculated. Printed in black and white in a sans serif typeface, the invitation cards were a model of elegant restraint. The entrance fee of 20 francs would be donated to two charitable organizations: the Société de la Charité Maternelle de Paris, established in 1784 under the patronage of Marie-Antoinette, and the Assistance Privée à la Classe Moyenne (Private Assistance for the Middle Class), presided over at that time by Maurice Donnay of the Académie Française. A new side of Gabrielle Chanel was revealed for the first time, a Mademoiselle who was a benefactor and patron of the arts, who had been a discreet supporter of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes since 1920. On November 5 - a symbolic number for Gabrielle Chanel, who always presented her Haute Couture collections on the fifth of February and August, and used it in the name of her perfume created in 1921 and her handbag in February 1955 - the private view opened in her townhouse at 29 rue du Faubourg SaintHonoré. There, in the eighteenth-century salons of the Hôtel Rohan-Montbazon - her home for nearly ten

years - the worlds of the arts, the press and high society converged. Beneath the lofty ceilings and gilded panelling burnished like the sun, between the gigantic mirrors, crystal lamps and Coromandel screens, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, and Gloria Swanson mingled. Under the heavy velvet curtains framing the vast French windows, José-Maria and Roussy Sert, Georges Auric, and the Ballets Russes ballerina Alice Nikitina gazed out upon the gardens of the Avenue Gabriel. On the deep carpets, amid the antique sofas and armchairs, Louis Metman and Georges Duthuit, curators at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and the Louvre, chatted with the wives of Cole Porter and Alphonse Daudet.

Dotted around were glass cases standing on marble pedestals and flooded with a mysterious light. Within them were wax mannequins, cleaned, made up and styled by Mademoiselle, looking as though they were about to come to life. Their throats and hands were adorned with precious stones, whose brilliance was multiplied in an infinity of cleverly placed mirrors, in which the creations could be studied from every angle. Setting her stage with a Surrealist flair, Gabrielle Chanel freed her jewellery from the traditional vitrines and sent her guests flying up into a star-spangled sky above a garden.

Among the most moving memories of the exhibition are some drawings by the illustrator Christian Bérard showing Mademoiselle preparing her wax mannequins. For the occasion, she also had the brilliant idea of commissioning Draeger, one of the great printers of the era, to print a sumptuous press kit of five strikingly framed blackand-white photographs of the jewellery taken by Robert Bresson, one of the future giants of French cinema. He accompanied the photographs with a signed manifesto explaining his approach. A copy of this document, handwritten by Jean Cocteau and bearing the emblematic image of a comet, is preserved in the archives of the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris.

Ninety years after the creation of this revolutionary collection, the Chanel Jewellery Creation Studio has drawn inspiration from the modernity of “Bijoux de Diamants” to create a new story. '1932' is a voyage beyond space and time, to gaze at the circling of the planets and the movements of the stars. From the legendary original collection, Patrice Leguéreau, Director of the Chanel Jewellery Creation Studio, has retained the celestial theme, the purity of the lines and the freedom of the body, declaring: “I wanted to return to the essence of 1932 and to harmonize the message around three symbols: the comet, the moon, and the sun. Every heavenly body shines with its own light.” 1932 traces a new map of the skies. With the comet, an icon of Chanel jewellery ever since the creation of the open necklace that wrapped around the neck and opened out over the chest. Spiral volutes and shooting meteors circle in endless pursuit of the celestial bodies. The moon, which was present on just one piece in the “Bijoux de Diamants” collection, becomes an icon in its own right in the 1932 collection. The original crescent moon now rises to fullness, surrounded by a shimmering halo. And of course there is the power of the sun, with its clear and graphic radiance.

In revisiting the past to better project itself into the future, Chanel invents living jewellery, in osmosis with the random rhythms of the body’s movements. 81 spectacular creations, of which 15 are transformable, coiling and resting freely on the skin in an abundance of celestial bodies. Starry volutes form a supple structure to be wound effortlessly around the wrist. The heartbeat with each breath makes the sun quiver at the base of the neck. In wearing the stars as she pleases, every woman decides in her own way how to extend the course of the comets along her skin. Sapphires as blue as the night, diamonds as yellow as the sun’s fire, opals as dense as a galaxy, rubies of a vibrant red, spinels glowing like dawn, tanzanites with the colour of the skies: if the original collection was almost entirely pristine, an epitome of pure light, the 1932 collection gives pride and place to coloured gemstones.

The Allure Céleste necklace - the signature piece of the collection - is a journey into the heart of light, the light that emanates from the stars and links them in the immensity of the skies. Among the round-cut diamonds, an oval sapphire of a deep and intense blue and an exceptional weight of 55.55 carats and a Type IIa DFL 8.05 carat pear-cut diamond radiate with an extraordinary brilliance. The halos on this transformable piece detach to become brooches, just as the central row of diamonds becomes a bracelet, transforming the necklace into a short version and paying homage to the pieces created in 1932 by Mademoiselle Chanel, who wanted to cover women with constellations.

THE POWER OF INSTINCT