The word ‘glamour’ has an interesting origin. It comes to us from the Scottish, who in the 1800s derived it from ‘grammar’. The idea was that education and erudition, rare and arcane at the time, involved some degree of the magical and the mystical. So glamour became an act of illusion, of some kind of magical trick made to the appearance to mystify and allure.
Earlier this month, Chanel introduced Reach For The Stars, its latest high jewellery collection, in the refined, old-world city of Kyoto. The French maison describes this new collection as “glamour according to Chanel”. In its high jewellery collections, Chanel has explored and iterated on graphical signatures like tweed, lions, and comets—even sports!—but it hadn’t yet taken on an abstract idea like glamour.
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Fortunately for the maison, it had a perfectly apt moment in its history to reference. That’s the 1930s, when Gabrielle Chanel was invited by a Hollywood film studio to design costumes and outfits for its stars and starlets. And is there a world more adept at the kind of illusory, smoke and mirrors glamour than Hollywood? Fake worlds built on soundstages and sets; hair, makeup and costumes to turn actresses into larger than life characters; the play of light and shadow to tell grand stories to stir hearts; and the scale of a silver screen to make humans appear as demigods.
Gabrielle Chanel would spend only a little bit of time in Hollywood all told, but her vision has inspired the Chanel Fine Jewellery design studio. An independent woman, wearing unfussy evening dresses with pure lines and streamlined silhouettes. From America, she took on an understanding of how they wore their jewellery: simple but devastatingly chic cascades of diamonds, statement cocktail rings with stones that draw eyes, and imposing necklaces that themselves became the visual centre of a look.
Reach For The Stars is a story of glamour told in three chapters. The most exciting is perhaps Wings, where Chanel is debuting a new visual motif in its jewellery. These wings are doubly inspired. First, by a Gabrielle Chanel quote on ambition from a September 1938 article in Vogue France: “If you were born without wings, do nothing to prevent them from growing”. Second, from a number of Hollywood film costumes that Chanel designed with winged details and silhouettes.
The masterpiece of the collection, for instance, is named the Wings of Chanel. It’s a necklace with a pair of diamond wings that unfold and wrap sensually around the neck. A line of diamond drops and buttons—evocative of the neckline of a dress—ends with an exceptional 19.55-carat Padparadscha sapphire in a perfect hue of salmony pink and orange.
In the Comet chapter, Chanel expands on its most foundational design signature in jewellery. The first and only collection of high jewellery that Gabrielle Chanel herself designed was the 1932 Bijoux de Diamants, in which diamond creations were accented with stars and comets.
A true standout, and this editor’s favourite, is the Dreams Come True necklace. Chanel’s Fine Jewellery Creation Studio sought to embody its black and white colour code in jewellery, and took inspiration from the sensual flou drape of an haute couture dress. Hence two woven chains of black-coated gold that trace a neckline, almost as if they were a rolled hem or a French seam. It’s contrasted on its sides with a cascade of mixed-cut diamonds, scattered with the airiness of Chantilly lace. At its centre, a comet clasp set with a 6.06-carat DFL diamond.
The collection closes out its thematic triptych with the Lion, the astrological and lucky sign of Gabrielle Chanel. The symbolic strength and boldness of the lion is treated with delicate, masterful subtlety in Reach For The Stars. Chanel has, for example, rendered the lion’s head in diamond-set openwork mountings, so that the leonine figure becomes an almost geometric suggestion.
On the Sky Is The Limit suite, a vision of a winged lion emerges. The great cat is sculpted as an abstracted, open-worked motif flanked with a mane of marquise-cut and bezel-set round diamonds. On this cocktail ring, a centre stone with the luminous, leonine warmth: an impressive 11.11-carat emerald-cut Fancy Vivid Yellow diamond.
