In the 1960s, Vogue editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland said that God had been fair to the Japanese. “He gave them no oil, no coal, no diamonds, no gold, no natural resources—nothing!” What the island nation had, and in spades, was “a sense of style— maintained through the centuries through hard work and the disciplines of ambition”. That’s the thought that lingered in my head as I headed to Kyoto in June with Chanel to see Reach For The Stars, the Parisian house’s newest high jewellery collection.
We know the house of Chanel today to be a behemoth, a juggernaut, a powerhouse in luxury and the finer life. What’s perhaps lesser known, or perhaps been forgotten in time, is that Gabrielle Chanel was a woman who made her own destiny. She was raised by strict, austere nuns in an orphanage in Aubazine Abbey—an unhappy upbringing by all accounts. As soon as she could, she created from scratch a glamorous life for herself in Paris. Historians and biographers have more factual evidence now of her earliest days, but in her time, Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel would put a spin and a shine on her past. She never invoked the word ‘orphanage’—instead, she had been ‘placed’ with unmarried aunts who simply favoured grey and black clothes.
The connection, for me, between a city like Kyoto and a figure like Chanel is the power of self-invention. Glamour not as a catch-all term for beautiful, shiny appearances, rather the driven intent to dress oneself and craft a purposeful image. Kyoto, which was once the seat of power as the imperial capital of Japan, is now home to the potent aesthetics of Japanese traditions and crafts. It lives on as much in the many temples, palaces and gardens as it does in the everyday streets.
Scenes from the Obai-in Zen temple where Chanel held a cocktail reception for its high jewellery collection launch. Courtesy of Chanel 
Courtesy of Chanel 
Courtesy of Chanel
Chanel welcomed the guests of its high jewellery event at a cocktail party in Ōbai-in, a sub-temple of Daitoku-ji, one of Kyoto’s largest Zen Buddhist temple complexes. We were wrapped in culture as the sun set. A lithe monk raking the gravel in a Zen stone garden, elegant musicians playing the traditional koto zither and the 17-pipe reed shō, an elder calligraphy master grandly dispensing dictums on washi paper, and modern origami artists folding paper gifts in the shapes of Chanel’s jewellery motifs. The following night’s gala at the Shogunzuka Seiryuden temple offered an elevated view of the city of Kyoto, with a drone show in the sky as the sun set. At dinner, a heart-thumping performance of traditional taiko drummers.
But the disarming beauty of Kyoto can be equally found, almost casually, walking its streets. I wandered, on a free day, into an unassuming store dealing exclusively in woodblock prints. Pieces by lesser artists, dating back to the 1700s, lined the store’s windows—liable to fading by sunlight. Inside, far rarer and more vaunted works by masters guarded in leather folios, and even Hokusai manga (sadly, spoken for). Down the road from this trove of treasures, a busy Starbucks.
A poignant artistic collaboration with the Okadas, Japanese lacquer artisans, formed an emotional tether and draw for the house of Chanel to the city of Kyoto. Courtesy of Chanel
The choice of debuting Reach For The Stars in Kyoto, a collection with no ostensible arching motifs or design links to Japan, was in fact a personal one. Patrice Leguéreau, the late director of Chanel’s fine jewellery creation studio, had a collaborative relationship with Okada Yūji, a Kyoto-born artist who was one of the great modern masters of Japanese lacquer crafts. Leguéreau got to know Okada in 2015, and in 2017 worked with the lacquer master for the first time on a piece of high jewellery. There is a suite of five brooches in this year’s collection, a fourth partnership realised with Okada’s son Okada Yoshio, an heir to the legacy described as a great Edo- or Meiji-era master reborn. More on that shortly—but Leguéreau’s desire, principally, had been to stage high jewellery in the city of Kyoto.
Reach For The Stars is inspired by the idea of glamour. The Chanel fine jewellery design studio linked it, particularly, to a moment in the 1930s when Gabrielle Chanel was invited to Hollywood. At the request of a major studio head, she was to design costumes and outfits for silver screen stars of the day. She returned to Paris fairly quickly, but the brief oeuvre of work that Chanel designed—dresses with wings, transposing her chic streamlined silhouettes on screen—was enough to light the spark of this collection.
The maison’s design studio seems to have taken on three key ideas. First, the cinematic plays of lights and colours that can make a screen character look larger than life; second, the jaunty, sporty way that Americans wore their diamonds; and third, self-invention as an indispensable element of glamour. The latter idea is spelt out in the novel way that Chanel has named its jewels. They have charming names that are almost commandments of self-belief: Embrace Your Destiny, Touch The Sky, Follow Your Heart, for example. The collection’s name, Reach For The Stars, in fact, should give you a clue.
Save for one collection that Gabrielle Chanel designed in 1932, the house of Chanel is a relative newcomer to high jewellery. Relative because its competitors in the segment are by and large heritage jewellers who have been crafting jewellery for over a century. Leguéreau was an important figure in developing the maison’s collections. He joined the house in 2009 and has carved out in remarkably little time a distinct identity for Chanel jewels.
Chanel’s imposing leonine symbol is exceedingly graceful in this collection. The Embrace Your Destiny necklace features the house’s first pair of lions faced off in profile, set with a pair of pear-cut DFL diamonds weighing 5.62 and 5.60 carats. Courtesy of Chanel
Leguéreau did this by mining judiciously from the lore and symbols of Chanel—both the woman and the house she built. After launching the quilt-motif Coco Crush fine jewellery collection in 2015, the house followed up in 2016 with high jewellery diamond and sapphire quilts in Signature de Chanel. The house’s links with Russia, Venice, Scotland, sailing and sport, vis-a-vis friends, lovers and the histories of Gabrielle, have also been expanded into exceptional collections.
Two motifs form the most indelible elements of Chanel high jewellery. Star-shaped comets drawn from the couturier’s first and only high jewellery collection, Bijoux de Diamants, in 1932. And lions, an auspicious symbol from her star sign of Leo. They are present in Reach For The Stars, but this year a new motif joins the Chanel jewellery lexicon for the first time: wings. The new collection, fittingly, divides itself into three chapters of comets, lions and wings.
Reach For The Stars expresses glamour, ambition and self-invention, summed up in this Coco Chanel quote: “If you were born without wings, do nothing to prevent them from growing.” Pictured here, the collection’s central Wings of Chanel necklace set with a mesmerising Padparadscha sapphire. Courtesy of Chanel
The Wings of Chanel necklace, which is the collection’s central masterpiece, offers the most splendid expression of the new motif. The central design is composed of a light and airy openworked lace of gold, fully set with diamonds. A mix of round and fancy-cut diamonds creates visual texture: baguettes enhance the sense of a wingspan’s elongated line, pears evoke a sense of fullness and volume, and marquises suggest the look of fluffy feather points. The necklace terminates with a line of diamond buttons and comets, which can be detached and worn as a bracelet, or left on the necklace to create the trompe l’oeil effect of a fabulous jewelled placket.
At the drop-shaped centre of the necklace, a remarkable Padparadscha sapphire with an orange-pink colour that summons visions of the loveliest sunsets. This gemstone was carefully sourced, as Chanel enjoys doing, with an eye for numerology—it’s precisely 19.55 carats, a nod to the year the famous quilted 2.55 handbag was introduced.
In the Wings chapter, there is also the Five Wings set of brooches that makes clearest Chanel’s link to Kyoto. These were realised with lacquer artisan Okada Yoshio, whose urushi and maki-e lacquer, coupled with gemstones, evoke sunset shades. Clear light in white diamonds, the warmth of the sun in yellow sapphires and spessartite garnets, the soft golden glow of a fading day in yellow sapphires, the twilight hour in blue sapphires, and the inkiness of dusk with black spinels.
A masterpiece of design: the Dreams Come True necklace, which evokes the fine lace neckline of an haute couture dress. Courtesy of Chanel
Comets, in this collection, take on an attractively slender and light dimension. The most outstanding creation in the chapter is the Dreams Come True necklace, which combines graphic symbolism, high jewellery savoir-faire developed by Chanel, and a graceful nod to haute couture. It’s composed of a loose cascade of mixed-cut diamonds, set and mounted so airily that it brings to mind lace trimmings on an haute couture gown. The main architecture of the necklace is formed by a line of black-coated gold, a design that seems to have grown out of the tube chains Chanel introduced in its sport-themed high jewellery last year. Where last year’s tube chain evoked drawstring cords, here they are reimagined and look akin to delicate hand-rolled French seams. Never mind the 6.06-carat DFL diamond at its centre—the triumph of this necklace is the rare sublimation of savoir-faire, creativity and a true expression of Chanel design.
The Strong As A Lion ring juxtaposes an abstracted lion’s head with a blazing comet. The former dotted with white and yellow diamonds, and the latter set with a brilliant-cut 3.04-carat Fancy Vivid Yellow diamond. Courtesy of Chanel
As for Gabrielle Chanel’s astrological sign, the lion’s strength and daring take on an elegant new subtlety. Lion figures are depicted largely through three-dimensional openworked shapes. Proud leonine brows, a chin and mane are sublimated into abstract, diamond-set curves and shapes, statuesque but without the overt feeling of wearing a statuette. It mixes particularly well with a dense, solid comet in the Strong As A Lion ring, a toi et moi design that pairs the two motifs together. The lion is accentuated on one side with a smattering of yellow diamonds, while the centre of the comet on the other is set with a tremendously and thoroughly hued 3.04-carat Fancy Vivid Yellow diamond, a symbolic twofer that’s as bold and assertive, indeed, as a lion and a shooting star.
The September ‘Big Fall Issue’ of Vogue Singapore is available online and on newsstands.
AloJapan.com