In 1921, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel commissioned perfumer Ernest Beaux to create a signature scent. The couturier thought-about the quantity 5 to be fortunate and, as the story goes, she consequently selected the fifth pattern of the perfume, deciding to call it No 5. A decade later, Mademoiselle (as she’s usually recognized) launched her first and solely official jewelry assortment, named Bijoux de Diamants, at her house on Paris’s Rue de Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Set with diamonds and sculpted utilizing platinum that was solid to form taking pictures stars and bows, most of the items had been later disassembled. A surviving brooch was ultimately recovered by Chanel, and it’s now a part of the home’s heritage assortment.
To rejoice No 5’s one centesimal anniversary, Patrice Leguéreau, director of Chanel’s effective jewelry creation studio, has introduced these two worlds along with Collection No 5, the first excessive jewelry line to pay homage to a perfume. The 123-piece tribute assortment is impressed by No 5’s iconic bottle and, most notably, contains a magnificent necklace that showcases an unlimited, 55.55-carat diamond.
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Carved from a 170-carat tough stone to Leguéreau’s specs, the gem is a D Flawless, Type IIa diamond, which implies it’s as pure as attainable—lower than two per cent of gem-quality diamonds are Type IIa. Mined in Lesotho, in Africa, the jewel took over a 12 months to form and polish earlier than it was mounted onto a custom-made bezel setting of 104 round- and 42 baguette-cut diamonds. Chanel plans to maintain the necklace at its newly renovated flagship boutique on Place Vendôme, which is the place Leguéreau video calls me from.
“The design course of was very pure,” he says about the necklace earlier than exhibiting me his preliminary sketches, dated greater than three years in the past. “I wished the assortment to have a masterpiece that may be set with a spectacular stone.”
The necklace was Leguéreau’s concluding No 5 design. “I knew precisely what I wished,” he says. “It needed to have figuring out components of the No 5 fragrance, together with the stopper and bottle. It additionally wanted to evoke the perfume’s richness.” The emblematic scent is dropped at life utilizing pear-cut, amber- and powder-coloured stones together with citrine and imperial topaz.
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Leguéreau is clean—clearly, and immaculately turned-out. An hour into speaking to him, I can’t assist however proceed to note as a lot. When requested what qualities he shares with Chanel’s founder, he replies: “Her perfectionism”. He sits beside a marble desk suffering from tracing paper and pencils. “It’s at all times a problem to invent new territory in the world of jewelry,” he says. Since becoming a member of Chanel in 2009, the creator has elevated his division’s use of the home’s signature motifs, together with its suns, ribbons and camellias. Last 12 months, designers labored on his Tweed de Chanel assortment, for which numerous cuts of gems had been labored into valuable steel to mimic tweed’s irregular weave.
Taking inspiration from Chanel’s best-known fragrance was straightforward, says Leguéreau, however reworking it into jewelry was an unprecedented problem. “No 5 is greater than only a material; it’s an icon. I wasn’t very assured in the starting.”
The fragrance has been a worldwide bestseller for many years and sits on thousands and thousands of dressing tables round the world. “The concept was so sturdy and new; so large and spectacular.” Leguéreau says he felt a variety of stress. “I don’t know learn how to describe it. It made me type of shy. When I first began engaged on this assortment, I stored it very quiet.”
One individual he did open up to was Olivier Polge, Chanel’s perfumer, with whom Leguéreau may be very shut. During the jasmine harvest final August, Leguéreau travelled to Grasse to be taught extra about how Chanel’s basic scent is produced. “I wanted to know what No 5 is right this moment.”
Strong and reassuring, a spritz of this well-known fragrance is precisely what we want in these unsettling instances. And a 55.55-carat diamond necklace doesn’t harm, both.
