Harvest Time

After 17 years of honing its craft, Chanel is at the peak of its jewellery making prowess, its International Jewellery Director Benjamin Comar shares with candice chan.

IN THE TIME-honoured trade of high jewellery-making, Chanel is considered a teenager. With the exception of a one-off collection designed by founder Gabrielle Chanel in 1932, its 17-year devotion to the craft began only in 1999 with the Passages collection. And it is this youthful vigour that has allowed Chanel to create a contemporary and independent stylistic language that is unshackled to a rigid past. While adhering to the strict framework of traditional French jewellery craftsmanship, its artisans and designers dream up creations with a sense of fluidity that make them modern, wearable and resolutely feminine.

“Jewellery used to be a symbol of power that kings, pharaohs and bishops wore. [At Chanel,] we want it to be a symbol of femininity, freedom and liberty,” explains Benjamin Comar, Chanel’s international jewellery director. Speaking to Prestige from one of the guest rooms at the newly renovated Hôtel Ritz Paris, he is brimming with pride and excitement from the outstanding response garnered from the Maison’s newest high jewellery collection, Les Bles de Chanel. Across the corridor, at the hotel’s Coco Chanel suite, international media and VIP clients move amongst small wheat plots to discover the 62-piece collection, a glittering tribute to the proverbial plant and its symbolic links to regeneration, abundance and good fortune.