Marie Teissonniere Wears Tweed de Chanel High Jewelry for Harper's Bazaar Arabia

Is there any designer more synonymous with tweed than Coco Chanel? Here’s the backstory on how Coco’s love of tweed has been translated into high jewelry.

It’s dubious that any endeavor involving Coco Chanel, the iconic fashion designer known for her minimalist aesthetic and timeless designs, happened in a moment of complete serendipidity. Already established as a prominent designer in 1919, the 32-year-old designer enjoyed major success with a global clientele.

Four years later, Chanel found herself captivated by the charismatic 2nd Duke of Westminster during a fateful dinner in Monte Carlo in the late fall of 1923. There’s little evidence that Coco knew about the Duke’s love of tweed jackets and undertook a stealth mission to leverage it for her business interests.

Shortly after that first dinner meeting, Coco Chanel was borrowing the Duke of Westminster’s aristocratic, tweed jackets either with his permission of after raiding his closet.

Fast forward 100 years to the studio of Patrice Leguéreau, director of Chanel’s Fine Jewelry Creation Studio since 2009. In 2020 Leguéreau began the quest of re-creating tweed’s nubby material’s texture into a Chanel High Jewelry collection. The vision had percolated in the director’s mind since he arrived at the house.

Nubby surface pieces gradually emerged from the Chanel design studio until the summer of 2023, when the world gasped over the centerpiece of the collection — Tweed Couture necklace. Crafted from a mix of platinum, rose gold, pink sapphires, pearls, and diamonds, the design of the high jewelry necklace is quintessentially the design manifestation of Coco Chanel’s love of tweed.

The September 2023 issue of Harper’s Bazaar Arabia features rising model Marie Teissonniere wearing key pieces from Chanel’s Tweed high jewelry collection styled by Anna Castan. Photographer Mattia Guolo [IG] captures the fashion story ‘Total Knockout’, with its focus on new beauty products besides its new Tweed de Chanel high jewelery collection. / Hair by Jean-Luc Amarin; production by Jean-Marc Mondelet