Chanel’s Reach for the Stars High Jewelry Collection Brings the House’s Hollywood Mythos to Life
Chanel’s new high jewelry collection, Reach for the Stars, resurrects the house’s brief but blazing flirtation with Tinseltown. Like Hollywood itself, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel thrived on fiction—her most cherished invention was that her absent father had sailed to America in search of fortune. The United States became a lodestar for her, beckoning with the prospect of another life. When Chanel finally crossed the Atlantic in 1931, aboard the SS Europa, she brought with her an associate, two assistants, three maids, two models, 15 trunks, and 35 pieces of luggage—a retinue fit for a film star.
Hollywood was waiting. Studio mogul Samuel Goldwyn had offered her $1 million a year to dress his leading ladies, convinced that Chanel’s Parisian modernity would lure women to movie theaters. The designer arrived in Los Angeles to great fanfare and was met at Union Station by Greta Garbo herself, two queens acknowledging each other in a flurry of flashbulbs. The experiment would be short-lived, but it is that gilded interlude that Reach for the Stars so skillfully reimagines.
Conceived by Patrice Leguéreau, the late director of the company’s jewelry studio, the collection takes Hollywood’s golden era as inspiration. Diamonds and sapphires blaze like klieg lights; comets are elevated by lines of gold and diamonds; wings—Chanel’s oft-invoked metaphor for ambition—take flight in openwork pieces that shimmer like celluloid. “If you were born without wings, do nothing to prevent them from growing,” the designer once declared. In Hollywood, that aphorism was prophecy: Anyone could reinvent themselves, if only for the length of a reel.
My Paradise Bird I, by Cathleen Naundorf, 2008.
The most dazzling of the baubles is the Sunny Days brooch. At its center sits a spessartite garnet, the shade of a California sunrise, haloed by yellow and cognac diamonds, pink spinels, and yellow sapphires. The setting gives it an unexpected lightness, as if the jewel were not an ornament but a shaft of sunlight caught and held in place. It is audacious, cinematic, and improbably wearable—an emblem not just of Chanel’s Hollywood sojourn, but of glamour itself.
Elsewhere in the collection, celestial bodies streak across necklaces, recalling Chanel’s 1932 Bijoux de Diamants high jewelry collection and her belief in the eternal modernity of the star motif. Lions (Chanel’s astrological sign was Leo) roar in medallions and choker clasps, symbols of power leavened by elegance. But it is the wings that provide a through line: Diaphanous and articulated, they cling to the body as if preparing for flight. In them, one glimpses both Chanel’s unyielding independence and the promise of reinvention.
Chanel's Sunny Days brooch, price upon request
Ultimately, Goldwyn and his colleagues found Chanel’s silhouettes too clean, too austere for the Technicolor dream factory, and she refused to dilute her vision. She returned to Paris, where she would go on to dress Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, and Jane Fonda, among others, and where her name became as luminous as any on a cinema marquee. She didn’t conquer Hollywood, but then again, she hardly needed to. Chanel simply cast herself in a role no one else could play. With Reach for the Stars, the house proves that some legends, like the stars who populate them, never fade.
Clockwise from top left: © Fine Art Images/Heritage Images via Getty Images; © CHANEL; Bettmann; Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images; © CHANEL; Bettmann.
