The act of creation is mysterious, as any who engages in it will tell you. The secrets, stories, trivia, and influences, the minutiae of a life lived seep inevitably into what one makes. So it was for the haute couture designer Gabrielle Chanel, for whom creation meant the freedom to draw freely from various wells. The inner landscape of one’s mind and personality, the memories and encounters on the journey of life… the way these incorporeal things manifest in life as recurring motifs has inspired the latest collection of Chanel high jewellery.
Titled Signes & Symboles, this new 85-piece collection both distills the mythos of Chanel into legible motifs, and sublimates it as powerful, intimate jewels. A lot of high jewellery can seem to exist for the sake of appearances and outward glamour, and so a collection that does the reverse of illuminating one’s interior world feels wonderfully contrarian. Much like the appeal of Gabrielle Chanel’s spirit, who was never one to do things just because it was the way things were done.
The distillation of the house and its founder’s mythos manifests as four key symbols. The starry comet, which Chanel watched in the Aubazine night sky as a child in an abbey; the gentle geometry and scentless perfection of the camellia that she borrowed from masculine wardrobes; the dauntless and powerful lion, the star sign she was born under; and sun rays that embody restorative health, time in paradise on the Côte d’Azur at her villa La Pausa. These signs and symbols found their way into Chanel’s belongings and dwellings at her apartment in rue Cambon, into her fashion designs, and now formally too in high jewellery that bears her name.
One masterpiece bears best the essence of these ideas: the Imprimé Lion necklace in white and rose gold, set with a bevy of diamonds and an octagonal blue sapphire of 20.66 carats. Though the remarkable sapphire, unheated and untreated, is the visual focus of the piece, its design nurses all of the signs and symbols dear to Chanel writ in diamonds.
The lion’s head at centre, sculptural yet subtle; and streams of camellias, stars, and sun rays set on fine streams of rose gold with the fine Vendôme fil couteau technique. The necklace has the impression of all of Chanel’s lucky signs spilling out in a rain of sparkling diamonds—a charming master work of beauty.
Signes & Symboles is further anchored by a quartet of cocktail rings set with the big four of precious gemstones: diamond, ruby, emerald and sapphire. On the Symbole Camélia Rose, Chanel has evinced the purity and grace of the camellia flower with the most outstanding single diamond in the collection. The ring is set with a 10.32-carat oval-cut D FL Type IIa diamond—the kind of impeccable grade and quality that Chanel prefers. Around it, the sensuous volumes of a camellia’s leaves are rendered in round- and custom baguette-cut diamonds, with pink sapphire borders.
The noble emerald, meanwhile, finds its home on the Imprimé Émeraude ring. Shaped like an amulet, the piece is set with a one-of-a-kind 10.44-carat octagonal untreated Colombian emerald. This gemstone has such a remarkable vibrant colour and visual clarity—extremely rare in emeralds—that in the light, it casts shadows of green. Its design is framed on the sides by a pair of camellias, punctuated with rose gold settings for a touch of warmth.
That amulet silhouette, as it happens, is one of Signes & Symboles’s recurring themes. They recall and summon up the feeling of Egyptian cartouche symbols, a sense of simultaneously ancient and ageless magic.
If one talisman is good, two might be better, as in the case of the Lion Millénaire, a transformable toi et moi style ring that can be split into two. On one side, the lion carved from diamonds and set against a backdrop of inky onyx; and on the other, a 9.41-carat oval-cut Mozambique ruby set snugly among diamonds as if a treasure being held close.
But perhaps most understated and likely appealing to gemstone connoisseurs is the Symbole Emblématique ring. The ring features none of the house’s symbols. Instead, it is designed with an elongated silhouette, frilled with talismanic links made of trios of baguette and round diamonds. It’s a sculptural silhouette that’s striking on its own, and creates the impression of a delicate fringed creature landing on the finger when it’s worn. At its centre, a 7.12-carat octagonal-cut Kashmir sapphire—an untreated and exceptionally beautiful rarity of a gemstone.
This particular eye for colour finds its rarest and most precious expression in these masterworks with the major gemstones, but the rest of the Signes & Symboles collection furthers the vibrant palette in a way that’s unexpected for a house that claims black and white as its colour codes. The collection has perhaps Chanel’s largest range of gems used in its jewels: fine stones like topazes, beryls, tanzanites, spessartite garnets, and decorative hard stones like turquoise, carnelian, chrysoprase and onyx.
A very delightful and collectible set of four Talisman Gabrielle rings, for instance, puts these hard stones to great effect. Chrysoprase is paired with the star, onyx with the sun, turquoise with the lion, and carnelian with the camellia—a set of rings that have the sense of good fortune emblems.
The house of Chanel may be known the world over by its crossed-Cs, but with Signes & Symboles high jewellery, it’s proving that for those truly in the know, and those privileged enough to access this sanctum of luxury, that there are plenty more potent symbols yet to discover from the maison.
