Gabrielle Chanel cultivated a private vocabulary of symbols. She surrounded herself with objects and emblems she regarded as auspicious, among them lions, sheaves of wheat, rock crystal and other personal talismans. She also attached meaning to imagery charged with sentiment: the comets she saw from the window during her time at Aubazine and later found worked into its cobblestones; the geometric purity of the camellia, which she admired and borrowed from the masculine wardrobe; and the energy of the sun, to which she responded instinctively. Her first boutique opened in the seaside town of Deauville, followed by another in Biarritz; she brought Breton stripes into fashion and turned the suntan into a signifier of privilege. That symbolic register remains central to the house’s high jewellery repertoire.
With Signes & Symboles, Chanel extends that vocabulary through an 85-piece high jewellery collection built on the house’s established iconography. Presented at La Pausa, Gabrielle Chanel’s villa in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, it revisits familiar emblems—lion, camellia, comet, star, and sun—and renders them with stronger chromatic ambition and a wider, more exceptional selection of stones than Chanel has shown in recent high jewellery collections.
The collection is organised into four creative lines—Les Imprimés, Le Lion Emblématique, Les Bijoux Talismans and Les Symboles—each anchored by a signature piece showcasing one of the four principal precious gemstones: ruby, sapphire, emerald or diamond. The Imprimé Lion necklace, for instance, centres on a 20.66-ct unheated Sri Lankan sapphire, surrounded by all five motifs from the collection.
The gemstone functions as a centrepiece rather than an organising principle; each line has its own creative character. Les Imprimés draws on Chanel’s recurring graphic motifs; Le Lion Emblématique is the most legible of the four, gathering the house’s lion iconography; Les Bijoux Talismans introduces the amulet as a new formal element; and Les Symboles places the house’s iconographic vocabulary at the foreground, the symbols themselves becoming the primary design element.
“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, great-niece of Gabrielle Chanel, quoted in Chanel Intime by Isabelle Fiemeyer
Among the recurring motifs, the lion is the most emphatic. Connected to Gabrielle Chanel’s zodiac sign, it functions as a heraldic emblem rather than a naturalistic depiction. First introduced to the high jewellery line in 2012, it appears here in two distinct forms: front-facing, with a mane radiating outward in full sculptural volume, and in profile, with the flattened precision of a bas-relief.
The Lion appears in two distinct forms
Two new formats shape the collection’s architecture. The plastron and band-style necklaces are designed around a square neckline, a deliberate nod to ancient dresses, featuring bold angular lines that demand precise craftsmanship. The amulet, first introduced in Les Bijoux Talismans (2015), is displayed either as a single piece or in multiples, engraved with symbolic markings as talismanic charms or crafted in openwork to lessen visual weight without losing impact.
The most notable development is in the use of colour. While Chanel’s high jewellery was originally characterised by a black-and-white graphic style, recent years have seen a broader palette, culminating here in a full spectrum of coloured gemstones—rubies, emeralds, sapphires, turquoise, chrysoprase, carnelian, imperial topaz and yellow beryl. More than 10,000 stones were collected over approximately three years, enabling the house to work with greater tonal variation and sharper contrast.
Turquoise is an atypical choice for the house, selected for the chromatic saturation it delivers at a level few stones can match. Chanel specified only vein-free specimens, a standard that generated considerable material wastage and required significant negotiation with suppliers to fulfil. The Symbole Emblématique ring demonstrates the payoff: a lion carved from turquoise, set against the deep orange of a round 12.47-ct spessartite garnet.
This choice—deliberate while not shying away from expense—defines the entire collection. The symbols are still the ones Gabrielle Chanel personally chose, but now they are crafted with more accuracy and ambition. Signes & Symboles clearly shows that the maison has established its unique voice in high jewellery, one that does not need to stray from its roots to show its ambition.
