Chanel's Wearable Coromandels: A First Look at the House's New High Jewelry Collection

In the days preceding the haute couture collections, some of the Place Vendôme’s biggest names begin showing creations to their most loyal clients On Friday, Chanel opens the season with a collection based entirely on Gabrielle Chanel’s beloved Coromandel screens—a first for the house. Whenever she moved house, from the chic 16th Arrondissement to the Ritz Paris (and, later, Switzerland), Gabrielle Chanel took her Coromandel screens with her to “upholster” her home “I’m like a snail.

I carry my house with me,” she once remarked to Claude Delay, her friend and biographer At one point, she owned more than 30 But her most beloved pieces, the ones she kept all her life and considered the doors to her private world, were the 17th- and 18th-century Coromandel folding screens she picked up in 1910 with the great love of her life, Boy Capel.

Today, these ornate, opulent black lacquer screens adorn the . More