The trappings of dressmaking — including thimbles, thread, scissors and measuring tapes — feature in a new 20-piece Couture O’Clock watch collection by Chanel, inspired by the house’s couture workshops on Rue Cambon in Paris.
Arnaud Chastaingt, director of Chanel’s Watchmaking Creation Studio, wrote in an email that he had chosen to focus on the “roots of the House” by reimagining the brand’s core watch designs, including the J12, the Première and the Boy.Friend.
The collection, available in Chanel boutiques in June, includes seven limited-edition versions of the J12, in varying combinations of steel, 18-karat gold, black and white ceramic and diamonds (starting at $7,000 for the 33 millimeter in white ceramic).
On three of these, the time is indicated by a pair of scissors and a sewing needle. Three others feature a cartoon depiction of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel wearing a suit and pearls. The seventh has a plainer, diamond-set dial.
The J12 Couture Workshop Automaton watch (price on application) is powered by the Caliber 6, Chanel’s newest in-house caliber and the first automaton complication to be created at the brand’s watchmaking facility in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. When the automaton is activated, the cartoon couturier appears to dance, scissors in hand, next to her dressmaking dummy.
It is a reminder, Mr. Chastaingt wrote, that “Mademoiselle Chanel thought of herself first and foremost as a seamstress.”
The Couture O’Clock collection also includes two new iterations of the Première, Chanel’s first watch design, which debuted in 1987. The Première Ruban Couture, priced at $9,650, features a double wraparound leather strap with the lines and numerals of a metric tape measure. The Première Charms Couture, for $10,300, has the same octagonal dial, but it dangles from a woven leather and gold-plated steel bracelet alongside steel and enamel charms of items like a spool of thread and a thimble.
On the new $10,300 Boy.Friend watch, the dial features a dressmaker’s pattern for a classic Chanel tweed jacket, while its bezel is adorned with an 18-karat gold chain, a reference to the chains sewn into the hems of those jackets.
The collection also includes four long 18-karat gold-and-diamond pendant watches, with dials hidden at the base of a thimble; inside a safety pin; in the waist of a couture dressmaker’s dummy; or within a pincushion-shaped medallion.
Chanel’s couture heritage was “an obsession, that I’m constantly taking into new territory that you don’t necessarily expect,” Mr. Chastaingt wrote.
Hence, that medallion pendant is also one of four new additions to the house’s Mademoiselle Privé collection. (That collection previously explored the theme of couture through the Bouton range, in which dials are hidden beneath bejeweled buttons on tweed and leather cuffs, and in the pincushion-inspired Pique-Aiguilles range.)
But the “masterpiece” of the Couture O’Clock collection, Mr. Chastaingt said, is a musical table clock and automaton called the Musical Clock Couture Workshop. At 34.2 centimeters (about 13.5 inches) tall, it features five dressmaker’s dummies, each adorned with an 18-karat gold and diamond brooch.
Powered by an automaton movement made by the Swiss company Reuge, the dummies rise, fall and swivel beneath a miniature gold and diamond chandelier, to the tune of “My Woman,” a song from 1932.
The time is displayed along a tape measure at the base, and the clock is wound using an 18-karat-gold key set with 221 diamonds, which hangs from a separate necklace that is set with 132 diamonds.
Mr. Chastaingt called the piece a “miniature world,” one that “suggests the eternal race of time.”
