Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel (1883-1971) was one of the defining figures of twentieth-century French fashion. Her place in the Cartier story rests less on commission records, of which none are publicly documented, than on the overlapping social world she shared with the family. Paris in the 1920s and 1930s was a small city for those who moved between fashion, jewellery, and the arts, and Chanel was embedded in it.
She was born in Saumur in 1883 and died in Paris in 1971 at the Hôtel Ritz, where she had lived for more than thirty years.
The Parisian social world
Chanel's path brought her into repeated contact with figures who were themselves clients or associates of Cartier. In 1924 she designed the costumes for the Ballets Russes production Le Train Bleu, with a libretto by Jean Cocteau and music by Darius Milhaud. Cocteau, decades later, would be fitted for the Académie Française sword made by Cartier Paris. From 1923 to around 1933 Chanel was in a relationship with the 2nd Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor, himself a client of Cartier London in the same years.
Bijoux de Diamants, 1932
In November 1932 Chanel mounted Bijoux de Diamants, an exhibition of diamond jewellery set in platinum held at her residence at 29 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The collection was commissioned by the Diamond Corporation of London, the De Beers-affiliated body seeking to revive diamond sales after the Depression, and was designed in collaboration with the artist Paul Iribe. It was the only high jewellery collection Chanel produced in her lifetime, and it coincided, almost to the year, with Louis Cartier's appointment of Jeanne Toussaint as Director of Fine Jewellery at Cartier in 1933. Two friends, adjacent Parisian years, both reshaping what French high jewellery could look like.
Friendship with Jeanne Toussaint
The most sustained Cartier connection is through Jeanne Toussaint, the creative director who shaped much of Cartier Paris's interwar output. The two were friends. Both had arrived in Paris from outside the established social world, Chanel from provincial France and Toussaint from Belgium, and both reached positions of influence in the Parisian luxury trades through the same decades.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), chs. 6-7
- Justine Picardie, Coco Chanel: The Legend and Life (HarperCollins, 2011)
- Encyclopaedia Britannica: Coco Chanel
- Victoria and Albert Museum: costume for Le Train Bleu, designed by Chanel
- Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris: 1971, death of Gabrielle Chanel
- Natural Diamonds Council: Chanel's 1932 diamond jewellery collection
- Sotheby's: How Jeanne Toussaint inspired the Cartier Panthère
