There is a version of high jewelry that is purely about accumulation. Here, the biggest stones, the rarest materials, and the most extravagant settings come out to play. And then there is a version that is about meaning. Chanel Signes & Symboles is emphatically, unapologetically the latter.
Chanel’s latest high jewelry collection, Signes & Symboles, focuses less on spectacle and more on the codes that shaped Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel herself. Presented at La Pausa, her restored villa overlooking the Mediterranean in the South of France, the 85-piece collection leans heavily into the house symbols that have followed Chanel for decades. Lions and camellias. Comets and stars. The number five. Talismans she carried close throughout her life. In the hands of Chanel’s Fine Jewelry Creation Studio, these symbols are not merely nostalgia. They are living things, newly set in extraordinary stones, rendered contemporary by technique and transformed by color into something surprising.
The Setting: La Pausa and Its Meaning
The choice to present Chanel Signes & Symboles at La Pausa was itself a symbolic act. The villa features details linked to Chanel’s life, from cloister-style arches inspired by the Aubazine convent where she spent part of her youth to the geometric lines and carefully designed interiors that mirror the visual language now associated with the brand. Frédéric Grangié, the President of Watches & Fine Jewellery at Chanel, described the collection as a “treasure chest” of stories tied to Chanel’s lifelong fascination with symbolism. “At the same time, in the end,” he said, “it’s really about her myth and those signs that she had with all her life.”
Taking pride of place in the entrance was the Imprimé Lion necklace, the collection’s most imposing statement piece and, in many ways, its thesis statement—the symbols of Chanel’s personal mythology given physical weight and precious form.
The Color Revolution
One of the most striking aspects of Chanel Signes & Symboles is what it does with color. Chanel’s high jewelry collections are often associated with black-and-white styling, but this line pushes much further into vibrant stones and mixed palettes. According to Grangié, more than 11,500 stones were sourced and matched over three years by Chanel’s in-house gemology team to ensure the colors worked together rather than competing for attention.
The collection is organised around four precious stone families—diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds. But within those categories, the palette extends dramatically: imperial topaz, yellow beryl, orange spinel, turquoise, chrysoprase, onyx, carnelian. Colorful brushstrokes in the late jewelry studio director Patrice Leguéreau’s research notes, dating back to late 2023 and early 2024, gave the impression of stones juxtaposed, hinting at a wider-than-before gem palette with something of textile development research as they wove across the page. It is a collection that honours Leguéreau’s legacy while pointing clearly toward Chanel jewelry’s future.
The Standout Pieces
Imprimé Lion — The Crown Jewel
Taking pride of place in the collection is “Imprimé Lion,” a statuesque plastron necklace with stars, stylised camellias, and radiant sunrays arranged in neat geometric lines and topped with a sculptural lion head and a 20.66-carat unheated Sri Lankan sapphire in an octagonal cut. The lion has been Leo Gabrielle Chanel’s ruling symbol since the beginning, her astrological sign, her personal emblem, her recurring obsession in collected art and decorative objects. Here, the lion is rendered as the apex of a jewelry composition that organises the entire visual grammar of the house into a single, extraordinary object.
Lion Emblématique Brooch
The Lion Emblématique brooch is crafted in white, yellow, and rose gold, set with diamonds, yellow diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, turquoise, and a 2.68-carat unheated Mozambique ruby. The decision to use six gem varieties in a single piece is bold. A lesser jewelry house might hesitate, but the Chanel Fine Jewelry Creation Studio has deployed them with the confidence of a painter who understands how to make colors sing in proximity rather than clash.
Lion Topaze Necklace
The Lion Topaze necklace explores a different emotional register. Crafted in yellow gold, it combines diamonds, yellow sapphires, beryls, imperial topaz, and orange spinels in a solar palette that feels warmer and more intimate than the blue-white grandeur of Imprimé Lion. It is the lion as warmth rather than authority, as domestic presence rather than cosmic symbol.
Lion Millénaire — Ring and Bracelet
The Lion Millénaire ring and bracelet offer the lion motif in a more wearable, everyday-luxury register. These two pieces acknowledge that Chanel Signes & Symboles is not only about statement objects but about the quieter pleasures of carrying a symbol close to the body.
Talisman de Symboles — The Camellia and the Star
The camellia—another of Chanel’s defining icons, chosen because it is a flower with no scent, that offends no one, and complements everything—recurs throughout the collection in forms ranging from sculptural to delicate. The Symbole Camélia Rose ring renders the flower in gemstone with extraordinary botanical precision.
Meanwhile, the Talisman de Symboles necklace brings together the cosmological and the personal, a piece that speaks directly to Chanel’s lifelong belief in signs, fate, and the protective power of symbols.
Talisman Contrasté Bracelet
The Talisman Contrasté bracelet is among the collection’s most quietly powerful pieces. Built on the principle of visual contrast (the juxtaposition of materials, tones, and textures that was fundamental to Chanel’s personal aesthetic), it embodies the idea that elegance is never monochrome.
Imprimé Bandeau Ring
Among the more unexpected pieces in Chanel Signes & Symboles is the Imprimé Bandeau ring, crafted in yellow gold and combining turquoise, chrysoprase, and red lacquer. It is the most coloristically adventurous piece in the collection, and the one that most directly echoes the kind of bold, unconventional combinations that made Coco Chanel a revolutionary figure in the first place.
The Legacy of Symbolism at Chanel
To understand why Chanel Signes & Symboles resonates so deeply, it helps to understand the role that signs and symbols played in Gabrielle Chanel’s own psychology. She was, by all accounts, deeply superstitious—a believer in fate, in lucky numbers, in the protective power of objects. The number five was her talisman. The lion was her guardian. The comet was her connection to the 1932 Bijoux de Diamants collection, the first major high jewelry collection she ever created, a collection in which she quite literally promised to cover women with constellations.
The lion, the number 5, the comet, the ribbon, the feather, and the camellia are six iconic motifs, six enduring emblems inherited from Gabrielle Chanel and reinterpreted by the CHANEL Fine Jewelry Creation Studio in its high jewelry collections. In Chanel Signes & Symboles, these motifs are not deployed as mere decorative references. They are given the weight of exceptional gemology, with unheated sapphires, no-oil Colombian emeralds, Argyle-provenance stones, and set within compositions that treat the history of the house not as a constraint but as a creative language that grows richer with every generation that speaks it.
The collection is, ultimately, a love letter: from the studio to the founder, from the present to the past, from every remarkable stone to the woman who first understood that jewelry, at its most powerful, is never just jewelry. It is a way of carrying meaning on the body and sharing it with the world.
Photos: Courtesy of Chanel
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