French luxury fashion house Chanel has unveiled its latest high jewelry line ‘Tweed De Chanel’ at London’s Royal Horticultural Halls.
The new line is an Ode to the Maison’s most Coveted Fabric – Tweed who’s history goes as far as 1925 to Gabrielle Chanel who borrowed her then-lover, the Duke of Westminster’s tweed jackets, and reinterpreted the material into her collections over the next century. Chanel feminized the fabric by using light tweeds and giving it a whole new dimension of color, richness and feel that suited her aesthetic of masculine and feminine all at once.
Patrice Leguereau, Director of the Chanel Fine Jewelry Creation Studio, has been obsessed with the fabric since he joined the French fashion house in 2009. in 2020, he designed a collection of 45 pieces devoted entirely to the fabric that was met with much success.
Leguereau once again used the fabric as a starting point for the new collection which this time comprises of 63-pieces and celebrates the diverse textures and nuances of color of the iconic fabric.
The collection builds on the designs of 2020 and features five new tweed jewelry weaves, in five different colors and adorned with five icons that were 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. The centrepiece of the collection is the Tweed Royal necklace that took almost two years to make and features a lion motif made from diamonds and rubies.
‘My dream was to create a tweed set with precious stones. I wanted to go further in the interpretation by creating a veritable fabric of precious stones that is light and supple. The idea was to penetrate more deeply into the material, to zoom in on the detail. And to enrich this founding theme of the house 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,’ Leguereau said of the collection.
