CHANEL AND TWEED – they go a long way back.

The French maison’s iconic tweed jacket is a beloved classic in the fashion world, with the woollen fabric having been ingeniously used in its design for decades. So perhaps it was not surprising that in 2020, Patrice Leguéreau, director of the Chanel Fine Jewellery Creation Studio, took the audacious step of translating the signature material into jewellery.

The result is a remarkable, 45-piece Tweed de Chanel High Jewellery collection that is an ode to the fabric, and a declaration of tweed as a precious material. Not only did it demonstrate the French maison’s technical and aesthetic tour de force in crafting jewellery, it also thrilled Chanel fans and gem-lovers alike.

Three years later, and the inimitable Leguéreau is dazzling us again with a second and larger collection of the Tweed de Chanel High Jewellery collection. The magic of tweed in precious metals and gems are now presented across 63 new pieces that continue to enthrall and delight.

But first, a brief history of how tweed became such a stunning success for Chanel and a distinct part of its style vocabulary.

Not just any tweed

Gabrielle Chanel discovered the harsh yet beautiful landscape of rolling hills and valleys of Scotland in the 1920s, during her love affair with the Duke of Westminster. As the life of the English aristocracy opened up to her, she visited the duke’s Scottish estate and became well-acquainted with tweed – a warm, comfortable, woolly fabric named after the River Tweed in the Scottish Borders, and woven in countless different patterns by the Scots.

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Mademoiselle Chanel borrowed the duke’s tweed jackets and proceeded to do what she is wont to do – reinterpret them in her collections. She gave it a relaxed, boxy shape and it quickly became a signature design that was further developed and given different iterations over the decades.

A dazzling rendition

Reconstructing the softness of tweed, its weave and its irregularities with precious metal and gemstones, all the while retaining the fabric’s suppleness, is a technical challenge that Chanel’s artisans rose to.

In bringing Leguéreau’s original visions to life in 2020, fine articulation of materials, miniscule hinges, rings and joints, light settings that appear to free stones from claws and judicious polishing came together to produce pieces that are as rich and comfortable as tweed.

The first Tweed de Chanel High Jewellery collection, says Leguéreau, was an introduction and a foundation for future collections inspired by a fabric central to the Chanel universe – and to which he was immediately drawn.

“While jewellery has often drawn on the codes of couture, it is exceptional for a fabric to serve as the point of departure for a jewellery collection,” he acknowledges. “But ever since I joined Chanel in 2009, I have been fascinated by tweed.”

Tweed de Chanel 2023

In preparation for the second collection of Tweed de Chanel, Leguéreau had squares of tweed woven specially, so that he could examine the fabric close up and draw further inspiration from it.

“The idea was to penetrate more deeply into the material, to zoom in on the detail,” explains Leguéreau, who was seeking to enrich the maison’s founding theme with even more precious design and craftsmanship.

“I wanted to weave a tweed from precious stones, to create bolder shapes, to compose a unique story with every piece in the collection.”

The result is a fabulous new collection that is unveiled across five new tweed weaves, in five different colours and adorned with five symbols dear to Mademoiselle Chanel – the white ribbon, the pink camellia, the comet on a blue background, the yellow sun and the lion highlighted with flashes of red.

Five precious chapters

Present in Chanel’s haute couture collections from the very beginning, the Ribbon in this High Jewellery collection celebrates lightness, flexibility, movement and curves using white materials including pearls, diamonds and white gold, says Leguéreau.

The Camellia, meanwhile, is an icon in Mademoiselle Chanel’s style for the liberated woman, and also a symbol of delicacy and distinction. Playing on transparencies and contrasts, the flower’s geometrical perfection is etched in rose gold embroideries set with powder-pink and fuchsia sapphires and spinels against a textured weave.

The third symbol, the Star, is an emblem of Bijoux de Diamants, the first and only High Jewellery collection created by Mademoiselle Chanel in 1932. Here, the depths of the starry night sky is “an exploration of blue in all its shades, from onyx to sapphire to lapis lazuli, with small stars scattered through the tweed like embroideries”, describes Leguéreau.

The Sun on the other hand, is radiant, its beams translating into a glittering tweed that alternates large volumes and plays on transparency. In a dazzling evocation of Byzantine and Venetian magnificence, the pieces are bolder and more opulent, with a multitude of yellow stones set in a weave of gold.

“And finally, the Lion flaunts its unrivalled power in a world where the dominant energy of red creates a tweed of great richness and flamboyance,” says Leguéreau. The lion is, of course, Mademoiselle Chanel’s star sign and the emblem of Chanel High Jewellery. “Each of these families thus expresses a different spirit, density and volume.”

Over these five precious chapters, the charms of tweed are recreated in plastrons, necklaces and sautoirs, bracelets, brooches, rings and earrings, with each symbol represented either delicately within the clasp or in its full glory on the piece.

A masterclass in technical prowess

Like the first Tweed de Chanel High Jewellery collection, this second collection employs the same technical finesse to create supple pieces that display the gemstones’ natural beauty.

Remarkably, the jewellery is airy and textured, with the weave of the tweed fringed and lightened. It is also graphic and symmetrical, structured and enriched to create a veritable fabric of jewels. The interweaving of gold, pearls and precious stones, the varied sizes of the stones, and the play of the openwork come together magically to bring into existence the fleecy, textured thickness of tweed.

The fibre’s comfort and softness, meanwhile, are echoed in the work carried out on the back of each piece, so the wearer feels like she is being “draped with a piece of fabric”.

As Leguéreau puts it: “You can’t imagine the ingenuity and inventiveness deployed by the craftspeople in our workshops in reproducing the flexibility and fluidity of the fabric using metal and precious stones!”

Indeed, prior to 2020, who would have thought tweed could be worn as jewellery?

With Leguéreau’s rich imagination and the extraordinary skills and savoir faire of Chanel’s artisans, this has been made possible again – in the bewitching 2023 Tweed de Chanel High Jewellery collection.

THE MAKING OF A MASTERPIECE

The centrepiece of the Tweed de Chanel collection is the Tweed Royal, a majestic creation befitting its name. The set comprises several pieces, including a gorgeous bracelet and an open ring, both with parts that can be worn together or separately.

The star of the set is the intricately crafted plastron necklace that is trimmed with a chain, its yellow gold weave set with diamonds and a magnificent ensemble of rubies. The diamond lion’s head at its centre can be detached to be worn as a brooch, while the magnificent pear-cut diamond hanging just below it, can also be removed and worn as a ring.