The watchmaking industry traditionally favours restrained colours, such as black, white, and as evidenced in this year’s J12 Bleu, blue. Chanel’s new 19-piece Blush Watch Capsule Collection, however, deviates from this limited palette with a playful vibrancy usually associated with its beauty products.
Conceived by Arnaud Chastaingt, director of its Watch Creation Studio, the collection incorporates shades of rose, coral, and crimson directly from its lacquered makeup cases into watch dials, bezels, and bracelets. Across the capsule, movements are conventional—reliable automatic calibres or high-precision quartz—but technical intrigue resides on the surface. To execute his vision, Chastaingt’s most precious pieces are created with the help of metiers d’art such as grand-feu enamel, tampography, gem setting, and gold sculpture.
Chanel’s beauty objects, he says, teach authoritative elegance and striking, deliberate geometry, while “black lacquer … intensifies the richness of a crimson hue or the softness of a powdered pink”. With these palettes and tools, he linked watch dials with art movements like “Dripping Art” and “Pop Art”, prompting the question: Why not make makeup even more beautiful by putting it on time?
The most elaborate answer to that question is the unique Mademoiselle Prive Pincushion “Beauty Art” watch, a 55-mm titanium tableau adorned with Gabrielle Chanel’s hands sculpted in gold and complete with rings set with pink sapphires that hover above ink-black makeup essentials, all rendered in enamel by Les Cadraniers de Genève. This work of art features 120 diamonds and 234 sculpted gold pearls, as well as a bezel set with 84 baguette sapphires.
Chanel’s high jewellery expertise is also evident in three pendant watches. The Secret Watch “Kiss Me” hides a lacquer dial inside a titanium lipstick tube. Flip the cap and baguette-cut beryls shimmer at the rim, its hinge echoing the tactile snap of its cosmetic cousin. On its counterpart, the Amulet Watch “Protect Me”, Gabrielle’s eye is rendered in grand-feu enamel and surrounded by 332 diamonds in subtle shades of white, beige, and brown. It took five months to source stones that would grade seamlessly, and two more to paint her gaze.
Completing the trio, the Talisman Watch “Give Me Luck” recasts the Les 4 Ombres eyeshadow palette in glossy onyx. The front boasts a quartet of cherry-red rubellite cabochons and five pink tourmalines arranged in a Byzantine motif dear to the founder. On the reverse, a diamond pave-set yellow gold hour circle contrasts with the black stone. All three pendants swing from yellow gold chains dotted with onyx and diamonds.
On the white gold Boy-Friend “Coco Art”, a tampograph portrait in the style of Pop Art depicts Gabrielle Chanel checking her reflection in a powder compact. Pink enamel and 38 sapphires set in the bezel add a bold splash of colour, while the manual-wind movement keeps the watch thin.
Collectors who associate Chanel with the J12 will appreciate its three special editions that are the centrepiece of the collection. Five watches are included in the J12 “Dripping Art” box set, each with enamel splashed across their black ceramic dials and bezels—an effect that took a hundred firing tests and 200 hours of research before production could commence. The sets are limited to five, each enclosed in a lacquered wooden case with the same abstract pattern.
Also timely is the J12 Pink Line, which pairs 342 baguette-shaped black ceramic inserts with 160 baguette-cut pink sapphires, creating an elegant silhouette. It took gem setters more than 300 hours to set the stones and inserts, and six weeks to carve channels into each bracelet link. Meanwhile, the J12 Pink Palette boasts 58 pink sapphires in nine shades. From pastel to fuchsia, their hues fade across the bezel and dial, resembling lipstick swatches.
