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Mirror mirror
A look back at Chanel’s three decades of dressing the wrist.
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Thirty years ago Chanel was a name well known to women but the brand was stepping into a field it had no experience or expertise in, namely watches. It wasn’t Swiss, nor had it ever assembled cogs and spindles into a working movement. However it did have an undisputed advantage in its market: it understood its female clientele.
It was this understanding that led Paris-based Chanel to believe that women wanted something different in a watch, something not just impressive or dazzling but also elegant. Chanel’s head of watches, Nicolas Beau, says the company’s “focus on women is not a ‘strategy’. It’s what we do. We’re deeply engaged with them, so for us it’s a natural.”
As to what they want in a watch, Beau is clear: “Women are interested in mechanics, but they are primarily interested in the beauty of an object.”
The brand’s first timepiece was the Première, which appeared in October 1987. The name was chosen because of its connotations – French for first, superior – while the shape of the watch was inspired by the N°5 bottle stopper of the brand’s iconic fragrance, itself a play on the design of Paris’ Place Vendôme.
A stylish debutante
The thinking behind the Première was simple. Chanel wanted a watch for women with a recognisable feminine style, not something that was a mere reworking of a man’s watch.
The brief was to create both an authentic timekeeper and a statement of style, one that’s proved impervious to the changing winds of fashion and has provided a platform for some extraordinary watches to this day.
“Women are primarily interested in the beauty of an object.”
As Chanel describes it, the reason for such longevity is that the Première, by being basically a shape, is something that doesn’t rely on dials or markers and offers creative possibilities beyond the norm – the opportunity for “surprise and wonder”.
Importantly, that shape could also accommodate the motifs loved by founder Coco Chanel and long associated with the brand, including pearls, camellias, comets, lions and quilting. It could also accommodate playful mechanisms.
In 2012, to mark its 25th anniversary, the Première was given a flying tourbillon, “an invitation to women to enter the world of highly complicated timepieces”. Later creations crowned the tourbillon mechanism with diamonds in the form of a camellia or a comet, at the time new to the watchmaking world.
Not that it’s just about decoration. In 2012 Chanel took out the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève in the Ladies’ Watch category for the Première Flying Tourbillon, a prize awarded to the most innovative players in watchmaking.
That same year the brand launched the Mademoiselle Privé collection, a set of one-of-a-kind artisanal pieces featuring exquisitely different dials threaded with gold, diamond and mother-of-pearl marquetry. The following year a Mademoiselle Privé Camélia Brodé, with a dial embroidered in silk using a needle-painting technique, took out a Watchmaking Grand Prix in the Artistic Crafts category.
Ceramic breakthrough
If these were strikingly feminine timepieces, in 2000 Chanel launched a handsome, unisex J12 that put ceramics on the watchmaking map.
Created in black ceramic with a matching ceramic bracelet and later in a pearly white version, it was not the first watch cased in the material but was the first to make such a watch desirable. It was helped by a design inspired by the appearance of the Rolex Submariner, the masculine timepiece finding favour with females.
With these looks and mechanical movements, the J12 became a genuine watchmaking icon and style-setter, a watch loved by both collectors and those with an eye for trends.
Its star has not faded. Highly complicated and jewelled versions have followed and 17 years on the J12 continues to perform, the latest offering a petite and resolutely feminine XS version.
Boys, men: it’s complicated
With the J12 becoming more feminine, Chanel realised there was another trend gaining pace, one that suggested more androgynous lines would appeal to many females.
The result? Two years back the Boy∙Friend watch appeared, possibly the first timepiece that is masculine in appearance, but totally dedicated to women. It now comes in various guises, including Tweed variants with a supple bracelet inspired by tweed cloth but woven from steel thread.
But the real challenge was to come, Chanel last year announcing its first in-house haute horlogerie movement, the Calibre 1. Boasting an instant jumping hour and retrograde minute indications, it powers the Monsieur de Chanel watch, the brand’s first timepiece dedicated to men.
Now this deeper dip into the world of fine-watchmaking has served as inspiration for our cover watch, a fitting marker for 30 years in a business some insiders felt Chanel had no business being in.
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Fashioning time
Chanel’s head of watchmaking, Nicolas Beau, make no bones about seeing the world of watches differently from others, and that includes how he views the brand’s 30 years in timepieces.
Rather than see it as a champagne moment, the urbane Frenchman views it as a time to take stock. “In watchmaking 30 years is nothing – you really want to be old. So it’s not something to celebrate so much as to highlight the impact we’ve had on style, what we’ve been adding – without arrogance – to watchmaking.
“It’s 30 years during which we’ve brought these creations, now bringing our new complication [movement] to the Première, and later in the year we will also have something completely new.”
Beau regards the present depressed watch climate as unusual and also fragile, but says the feminine market is much stronger than the masculine one.
While he cites the continuing flux in Chinese tourism, terrorism worries in Europe and economic uncertainty as factors, he also believes the industry has played a role. “There’s been a lack of creativity for a long time and the market is saturated.”
Beau says design is the key, adding: “We don’t look at the competition. Our creation is in France, which means we don’t regard watches as a traditional field where you have to look at how you did things 100 years ago.”
Anniversary bloom
Our cover watch, the Première Camellia Skeleton, comes 30 years after Chanel first introduced a watch dedicated to women, and sees the brand’s second in-house calibre take on the shape of a camellia.
Entirely skeletonised and styled to create a three-dimensional flower, the mechanism becomes the watch with its bridges outlining the petals and the cogs and wheels “animating” the petals’ heart.
Three years in the making, all elements of the 107-part movement had to be arranged in such a way as to leave the form of the camellia dominant, with the skeletonisation leaving only a lacework of essentials to work with.
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“Creating it was the exact opposite of the normal process,” says Chanel’s Nicolas Beau. “The mechanical parts had to be designed to replicate the flower, the wheels had to be the same dimension as the petals.”
To reinforce the sense of contrast and capture the play of light, the bridges are angled before being blackened with a diamond-like carbon (DLC) coating, while a fully gem-set version has a grey-gold skeleton plate, the latter studded with 246 individually placed diamonds chosen for exceptional brilliance.
The camellia motif is equally visible from the back of the watch, along with the figure of a lion – a nod to founder Coco Chanel’s zodiac sign and the emblem of Chanel’s in-house fine-watchmaking efforts.
It’s a symbol you’re going to be seeing a lot more of. Closer to the actual anniversary date of Chanel’s foray into timepieces – around September – Chanel plans to release what Beau describes as “our vision of the watch for the next 30 years, a watch for women for daily wear”.