1 August 2017
The Première Squelette Camélia celebrates 30 years of Chanel watches in grand style. With an unusual floral tribute: an in-house mechanical movement in the shape of a camellia, Mademoiselle Coco’s favorite flower. The product of three years of study, it takes a new approach to the concept of skeletonization—the art of reducing the components of a movement to a minimum with file and saw in order to reveal its essential structure. The technicians at Chanel’s department of haute horlogerie have designed it from scratch: starting from the bridges, i.e. from the supporting parts, in the form of petals, on both the dial side and the back side, and then moving on to the functional members, which have been designed to fit inside them, following their silhouettes, in such a way as to make them as unobtrusive as possible and to emphasize the flower to the maximum. In this way, they have created a three-dimensional architecture that closely resembles the house’s fine jewelry collection of the same name. And they have produced a movement that is not just the “engine” of the watch, but an integral part of its decoration. Mounted in a case of white gold, studded with brilliant-cut and baguette-cut diamonds, it is available in four versions: one in which the bridges have been blackened with an innovative coating called ADLC (Amorphous Diamond Like Carbon), two with the bridges set with diamonds (a further difficulty, given the reduced thickness of the bridges) and a last set with rubies. All obviously produced in limited editions.
