FIELDS OF GOLD Chanel’s new Les Blés de Chanel high jewellery collection takes the symbolism of wheat as its inspiration.
The new Les Blés de Chanel high jewellery collection takes the symbolism of wheat as its inspiration.
Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s fondness for the elegant yet unscented camellia flower is legendary, but it was actually fresh bouquets of wheat that she liked to arrange in her homes. For the famously superstitious designer, the wheat sheaf, a symbol of regeneration, abundance and prosperity, became her personal luck charm, and it lives on as a key motif for her house.
“For Gabrielle Chanel’s father, wheat symbolised all that was good and wholesome,” explains Benjamin Comar, Chanel’s president of fine jewellery. “How many times as a child had she heard him call it ‘my good wheat’?” he says, touching on her pastoral childhood. “This expression resounded with her all her life.”
The maison’s latest high jewellery collection, Les Blés de Chanel, is entirely dedicated to Mademoiselle Chanel’s golden crop. During the Paris haute couture collections the newly refurbished Coco Chanel suite at the Ritz was tightly planted with a field of wheat for the occasion. Outside on the Place Vendôme, Chanel teamed up with street artist Gad Weil on a grander scale public installation of the grain.
THE CROWNING FÊTE DES MOISSONS NECKLACE FEATURES A 25 CARAT YELLOW DIAMOND
“She loved to surround herself with objects that ‘protected her’,” continues Comar. “So she had a lot of it in her apartment.” A replica of a wheat-legged, bronze Goossens coffee table from her Rue Cambon abode is a permanent fixture of the new Ritz suite, while her unframed Salvador Dalí painting of a sheaf (a gift from the artist) made the journey across the famous square for the presentation. “It is a sign of their long-term friendship,” adds Comar. “It also shows how important this symbol was for Gabrielle Chanel.”
The 62-piece collection farms this bucolic theme, working mainly in white and yellow marquise-cut diamonds, with green peridots and aquamarines representing the grain’s new spring stalks, before golden sapphires and pearls complete the harvest.
Two years in the making, the collection was created in Chanel’s state-of-the-art workshop located above its 18 Place Vendôme store, a building that was previously owned by Gabrielle Chanel’s long-term lover, Hugh Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster, and which sports panoramic views of the octagonal “square”. The collection’s crowning Fête des Moissons necklace features a 25 carat yellow diamond cut in the shape of the square. And if you think you’ve seen that iconic design before, that’s because it was also Chanel’s inspiration for her No. 5 perfume bottle stopper.