CHANEL ‘Signes & Symboles’: The Imprimé Lion Necklace

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

She constructed her own myth out of mysteries, signs, and symbols; she lived it and was imbued with it; symbols were everywhere, in her beliefs, her apartment, her jewellery and her lucky charms, her style.

Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie on her aunt, Gabrielle Chanel¹

There are jewels that illustrate a collection, and others that contain it. The Imprimé Lion necklace, Masterpiece of CHANEL’s new High Jewellery opus Signes & Symboles, belongs unequivocally to the second category.

It is the only piece in the eighty-five creations of the collection to bring together, on a single precious fabric, the four identifying emblems of the House — the Camellia, the Star, the Sun and the Lion. To see them woven side by side, on the same vertical cascade, is to read Gabrielle Chanel’s personal grammar in a single sentence.

If her great-niece’s words form the philosophical key to the collection, the Imprimé Lion is its visual translation. The collection, conceived by the CHANEL Jewellery Creation Studio, gives in fact shape to the dialogue between these four symbols and the art of jewellery in its cultural and symbolic dimension.

Organised around four chapters — Les Imprimés, Le Lion Emblématique, Les Bijoux Talismans, and Les Symboles — it returns to the motifs that punctuated Gabrielle’s homes and intuitions, from the comets that streaked the Aubazine night sky to the stars set into the abbey’s cobblestones, from the geometric perfection of the camellia to the wondrous Mediterranean light she so often praised. Above all, it returns to the Lion: her birth sign, her sovereign, her self-portrait.

A V-Cascade, an Ancient Neckline

The Imprimé Lion is, first, a feat of architecture. Its silhouette unfolds as a V-shaped cascade — opulent, authoritative, deeply mirror-symmetrical — anchored by a stepped diamond at its tip. The two clearly defined angles of the necklace draw a near-square shape, an antique neckline reimagined for the contemporary body. Two parallel lines composed by a chain-within-a-chain articulation, specially developed by the Studio, allow the piece to follow the curve of the shoulder with the suppleness of fabric. The result is precious cloth, not metal.

Brilliant-cut, emerald-cut and made-to-measure diamonds are set onto delicate threads of pink and white gold, held by discreet prongs that punctuate the descending V. Three movements coexist within this composition: a vertical fall (the cascade itself, with its prestigious mirror effect), a horizontal pulse (the emerald-cut diamonds that mark the rhythm), and a radiant aura (the lion’s mane, deployed at the centre like an antique crown). The baguette cut accentuates the lines; the round brilliant lets the symbols sparkle; the emerald cut multiplies the play of facets. It is a study in geometry that never forgets its purpose: to honour, in light, four emblems Gabrielle would have recognised.

The 20.66-Carat Sapphire and the Sculptural Lion

At the heart of the necklace, the gaze settles on a single point: an octagonal-cut sapphire of 20.66 carats, an intense and luminous blue, delicately printed onto a mesh of diamonds, white gold and pink gold. Its octagonal facets echo the cuts of the diamonds beneath it, conferring formal unity to the piece, but its real role is protective. It crowns the head of the Lion — the central visual element of the necklace — and diffuses its aura over the feline below.

The Lion itself is sculptural, almost a bas-relief lifted from antiquity. Its gaze is sharp, the lines of its mouth are prominent, the volume of its face is fully in relief. Its mane evokes a radiating headdress, entirely set with baguette-cut diamonds, like the diadem of a Hellenistic sovereign. The triangle-cut diamond at the foot of the V naturally returns the eye upward, toward the sapphire and the Lion’s crowned head — a small piece of choreography that turns a necklace into a procession.

This is the Lion of Gabrielle Chanel: not the heraldic beast of Western jewellery tradition, but her own astrological sign, the emblem that has presided over CHANEL Haute Joaillerie since its very debut. Here, it returns at the heart of the collection that carries her name in its title, watching over the symbols she gathered around herself a century ago.

An Antique Inspiration, Patiently Assembled

Very fine lines of pink gold, seemingly woven on both the front and the reverse, underline the extreme sophistication of the piece and call to mind the goldwork of antique jewels. The reference is structural. Gabrielle Chanel’s taste for opulent pieces inspired by ancient cultures and Byzantine jewels is well documented — she did not hesitate to wear sumptuous jewels with more humble pieces she considered talismans — and the Studio has answered that taste with a piece that quietly invokes those references without quoting them.

Technically, the necklace demanded a complex assembly process to integrate certain of the pink gold icons, of which sometimes only the claws are rendered in pink gold. It is the kind of detail one does not see at first glance, the kind that reveals itself slowly, as great jewels always do.

A Reunion of Four Emblems, a Promise of More

What makes the Imprimé Lion the Masterpiece of Signes & Symboles is, ultimately, not its 20.66-carat sapphire, however magnificent. It is the fact that, on a single jewelled fabric, the Camellia, the Star, the Sun and the Lion appear together for the first time. The flower Gabrielle borrowed from the masculine wardrobe; the star she gathered from the cobblestones of Aubazine; the sun whose Mediterranean light she praised at La Pausa; and the Lion that watched over her birth chart. Four symbols in one necklace that speak of one woman’s interior cosmography.

The collection unfolding around it — eighty-five pieces, magnified by the “Precious Four” of sapphire, ruby, emerald and diamond, and ranging from the Lion Millénaire ruby ring to the cushion-cut 26.21-carat imperial topaz of the Symbole Étoile necklace — promises to extend this conversation. Signes & Symboles will be officially unveiled in Paris in July, and a dedicated exploration of its four chapters will follow on these pages.

Until then, the Lion keeps watch. And under the steady blue of its sapphire crown, the Camellia, the Star and the Sun seem, at last, to have come home.

¹ Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie, great-niece of Gabrielle Chanel, quoted by Isabelle Fiemeyer in Chanel Intime, Flammarion, 2011, p. 60.