This is #WINNING

A high jewelry collection inspired by sports, and hoodie drawstrings, and team colors, and performance materials? C'est impossible! Non, c'est Chanel.

- STELLENE VOLANDES

When is a one-of-a-kind Chanel diamond cuff most like a ski boot? When it’s handmolded from carbon fiber and designed to form perfectly around its owner’s wrist. “The objective,” says Frédéric Grangié, president of Chanel Watch and Fine Jewelry, of this highlight from Chanel’s new high jewelry collection, Haute Joaillerie Sport, “was to get the cuff exactly as our designer Patrice Leguéreau created it, meaning that you have four parts, three ways to wear it: all diamond, all carbon, diamond-carbon. And you have this incredible opening feature here, which is like a zip, and inside there is a fitting system on your wrist, very similar to a ski boot. It makes it fit perfectly, because the point of this collection is that it has to be comfortable, and comfortable in terms of performance. This cuff, when you wear it, it has to fit like a glove.”

To perform in a Chanel high jewelry cuff? It is a notion both tonguein-cheek and supremely serious. Grangié delivers the idea with a bit of mischievous pride: “We made sure the cuff fit perfectly, like great sports equipment. Your safety is important to us.” But the process of creating the cuff, of molding the material rather than the more traditional technique of cutting it, is painstaking, and likely never to be repeated.