Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel contained multitudes. Her shadow has loomed large in the fashion world for more than a century—and for good reason. Despite the attempts of various biographers, her legacy defies easy categorization. An underprivileged orphan who rose to become an imperious aristocrat of the mind, she helped create the template for ladylike dressing; but her designs also liberated women from the constraints of the corsets and underpinnings that prevailed before her. “I gave women back their bodies,” she once said.
Fittingly, this confounding lodestar of ultrafeminine chic, who passed away in 1971, was also somewhat of a jock. An adept equestrian, the young Chanel scandalized polite society when she began riding horses astride—a pursuit previously reserved for men—and she debuted a “sport” atelier within her haute couture house circa 1920. That spirit has coursed through the label’s collections ever since, and lives on with this year’s release of the brand’s Sport High Jewelry Collection. Just as Chanel’s deceptively simple sportswear adhered to and moved with a woman’s anatomy (one of her many maxims was that “luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury”), the exquisite cuffs, earrings, and necklaces in the 80-piece offering are streamlined to adapt to the body’s contours. In creating the collection, Patrice Leguéreau, director of the Chanel Jewelry Creation Studio, was inspired, he says, “by Chanel’s sporty style, which is such an integral part of the house’s history: the elegance of the line and the freedom of movement.”
Lead image clockwise from top left A 1916 illustration of Chanel models in The New York Herald (Getty Images); Gabrielle Chanel her then lover, Arthur “Boy” Capel, circa 1910 (Getty Images; with another beau, Hugh Grosvenor, the second Duke of Westminster, at the Chester Races in England, 1924 (Getty Images); the house’s business card, circa 1920, touted both “couture” and “sport” (Patrimoine de CHANEL, Paris © CHANEL); a mannequin wearing a Chanel necklace and jeweled headpiece, circa 1931 (Getty Images); a first-place rosette ribbon (Getty Images); a scrap of 19th-century French silk trimming with chevron bands, a motif seen throughout the collection (Universal Images Group); the Sport High Jewelry Gold Slider Necklace (Courtesy of Chanel).