It was almost as soon as Patrice Leguéreau took the job as Director of Chanel’s Fine Jewelry Studio that he knew he wanted to do something with the house’s signature tweed fabric. “I discovered [14 years ago]… the richness of the Chanel heritage and tweed is part of this, so I always kept in mind [the idea] of creating a very precious version of it,” he said.
The collection unveiled in London this week is the second chapter of Chanel’s Tweed collection. Leguéreau started his extension of his original 2020 collection with free-form paintings. Displayed in between a room of reinterpreted original-collection pieces and the “new opus” (as Leguéreau calls it), the paintings are big, bold, and colorful.
But we are here to talk about the jewels. “With the second collection, I worked with more details, more flexibilities, more colors,” he said. The resulting suites and pieces are full of rubies, lapis, sapphires, onyx, and diamonds, all brought together through highly intricate lattices of metalwork and settings to evoke the weave of tweed. There are other house codes throughout the collection, too. Openwork lion heads and camellia flowers include shimmering stones, much the way tweed can be more transparent than it at first seems when held up to the light.
The second act of Tweed has the hallmark asymmetry of Leguéreau’s work. Some earring pairs have one stud and one drop, and others boast one diamond climber and the other with the stones cascading down. “Sometimes [the asymmetry creates] modernity. I remember in the Wheat collection seven years ago there were no symmetric earrings included, and that gave more space to create,” says Patrice. “For this collection one earring pair has a camellia on one side and tweed on the other. There’s more information.”
The collection was feted on Tuesday evening at the British Museum with Keira Knightley, a Chanel ambassador, and her husband James Righton swaying to an upbeat and fun-filled performance by Kylie Minogue under the museum’s magnificent—and similarly tweed-like lattice glass—great dome. Leguéreau hints at more iterations of tweed for jewelry in the future: “For me it’s so Chanel that it’s limitless and timeless.”