French luxury brand Chanel has unveiled its first-ever High Jewelry collection dedicated entirely to tweed.
Titled 'Tweed de Chanel' the collection from the house's fine jewelry studio has been conceived around the Maison's iconic house fabric. Derived from the Scottish word tweel Tweed was Coco Chanel's longest-standing legacies who had borrowed it from menswear and adapted it to womenswear in the 1920s.
The new collection comprises of 45-pieces (42 pieces of jewelry and 3 jeweled watches) that intertwine gold, platinum, diamonds, pearls, sapphires, spinels, onyx, and topaz layered and woven together into multiple layers that imitate the texture of the tweed fabric.
Patrice Leguereau, director of Chanel's Fine Jewelry Creation Studio got the idea to transpose tweed into fine jewelry back in 2009 when he visited the Lesage embroidery workshop, a member of Chanel's Metiers d'Art. He began sketching the designs in 2017 and it took another two years to source and realize.
The names of the various series are Tweed Brode comprising of a ring, necklace, and brooch with diamonds in white gold, Tweed Contraste comprising of ring and earrings in yellow gold and platinum, Tweed Cordage comprising of a ring, brooch, earrings, necklace and bracelet with diamonds in yellow/pink gold and platinum, Tweed d'Or comprising of earrings and necklace in yellow gold, platinum, pearls, diamonds and topaz, Tweed Frange comprising of necklace, earrings, and bracelet with diamonds in white gold, Tweed d'Ete comprising of a ring and a colorless round diamond, Tweed Chaine comprising of a bracelet with diamonds, pearls and tsavorites in yellow gold and platinum.
The piece de resistance of the collection is the Tweed Couture a platinum and pink gold necklace set with pink sapphires, spinels, diamonds, and one 10.20-carat cushion-cut diamond at its center. The piece took 980 hours of work with each stone purpose-cut to very small and exact dimensions in order to achieve the interwoven weft effect from afar.
'Tweed is very special and very unique for me because it's the first collection that started from a fabric technique, nota figurative element. Each piece of jewelry in Chanel is created to be worn. It's not done to be in a safe or window or museum. It's very important for me that every piece is very wearable and comfortable, that they fit the body perfectly. This is why the pieces are very flexible. We work very precisely on the weight; it's important that it's not too heavy,' said Leguereau of the collection.
Altogether, the Tweed de Chanel collection fuses the creativity and expression of Chanel High Jewelry with the timeless elegance of the rich Scottish cloth and begins a new chapter in the history of tweed for the Frech Fashion house.
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