Boy wonder
A boundary-breaking Chanel timepiece tweaked for a new generation
Coco Chanel revolutionised the way that women wore clothes and accessories, challenging gender stereotypes and assimilating traditionally male embellishments into her pieces. Her ethos lives on at the French fashion house, which continues to blur the gender boundaries in all its lines, including its watches. The ‘Boy.friend Skeleton’, which Chanel launched in 2015, played with established design codes, translating a typically masculine case into a chic watch for women. Instead of the conventional softened silhouette, a distinctive octagonal shape looked back to the brand’s first foray into watchmaking in 1987, redrawing the lines of the ‘Première’, which were originally inspired by the angled cap of the Chanel No.5 perfume bottle. The ‘Boy.friend Skeleton’ has now been rethought for a new generation. Nodding to the original, it puts the hypnotic circles of the in-house black-coated mechanical movement at its heart, juxtaposing its curving form against a sharp edging of baguette-cut diamonds.