Treasures Entwined

Masterfully crafted to reflect tweed—an iconic fabric of Chanel since the 1920s— the Tweed de Chanel high jewellery collection explores the suppleness and subtleties of the time‑honoured textile, interwoven with the five inimitable motifs of the house

- Dana Koh

Do you believe in luck? Gabrielle Chanel certainly did. A superstitious woman and an audacious romantic, mademoiselle Coco often drew on her life, loves and lucky charms—from numbers to her zodiac sign—to dream up the key codes of the eponymous house she founded in 1910.

And so it was with tweed, one of the house’s most famous signature fabrics, birthed from a love affair with the Duke of Westminster in the 1920s that swept the designer away to the rolling hills of Scotland. The story goes that the Highlands presented a gusty, chilly climate that she had not properly packed for, but fortunately, just like how he opened up a life of English aristocracy to her, the duke opened up his closet, from which mademoiselle borrowed his tweed jackets to shield against the elements. 

Call it a stroke of luck or a stroke of genius, but it was in the moments that she was bundled up in the ultra‑warm, durable and waterproof glory of tweed that inspiration struck and she decided to incorporate the nubby‑textured fabric into her creations. Of course, she took it and made it entirely her own, transforming the hard‑wearing textile into plush sartorial pieces that she extended to her more sporty female clientele first, before eventually spinning it into a stylistic icon of the house. What would Chanel be without its emblematic, inimitable tweed suits? We’ll never know.