Charlotte Chesnais

GG, YSL, D&G, DVF, DKNY. In fashion, initials are important. Whilst intimately linked to their founder, they can also be diffused effortlessly across the world—a totemic symbol without the risk of dodgy pronunciation. And in French luxury one name carries a particular monogrammatic weight. Coco Chanel, whose interlocked CC initials—creates one of the most recognizable logos in the world.

Jewellery designer Charlotte Chesnais was understandably a little overwhelmed when it came to naming her brand—which she started in 2015—after herself. It was her friend, Lucien Pagès, founder of his—namesake—PR firm Lucien Pagès, who persuaded her otherwise. “I said can you help me with finding a good name? And he was so surprised.

He was like, it’s going to be your name, of course.” Chesnais wasn’t so sure. “You hear bad stories about people using their name. I was very naive. I said are you sure? He was like: you have a nice name. We use your name.”

Chesnais is speaking to me from her office in Paris. Fresh from a skiing trip, she is talking to me about the weather. “I don’t know about London but we haven’t seen the sun in months. Everybody is in a good mood and Spring is coming in 20 days.” With sunlight behind her, Chesnais, who is 40, is a cheerful figure, as far as possible from fashion world stereotypes. With a blonde bob, she wears bug-eye sunglasses, a red foulard and jewellery of course—a curation of necklaces, rings and bracelets that stand out, even over video call.

With her brand, Chesnais has made her name for creating sculptural jewellery with a design grammar based on curves, coils and crescents—much like her initials in fact. In gold and silver—sometimes both—her deconstructive designs frame and contour its wearer’s body in innovative ways. ‘Biseau’ includes a ring that wraps across two fingers, and the unconnected ends are cut off at the sharp edge (‘bevel’ is how the collection translates). Elsewhere are serpentine pendants, ‘Lasso’ hoop earrings and ‘Echo’ rings designed to be worn in the middle of the finger.

But for Chesnais “sculptural” is really more than just marketing speak. Chesnais actually thinks of her designs as such, and aims for them to work as both an objet d’art that can be activated by a wearer and bijouterie that can happily sit on a mantelpiece.

“To me it’s like looking through the right eye and looking through the left eye. The right side is, it has to be nice on the body and then the left side is, it has to be nice on the table. And I always work with these two sets exactly at the same level.”

Her parcours is also not a straight line. Chenais is an alumna of Studio Berçot, the French fashion school known for producing talents such as Martine Sitbon, Isabel Marant, Camille Bidault-Waddington, Vanessa Seward and Nicole Fahri. She went on to spend six years in-house at Balenciaga, working under then Creative Director Nicholas Ghesquière. Describing the years with Ghesquière as “very rich” and “daring,” providentially it was he who asked her to make jewellery.

“At the time jewellery was a small category, commercially-speaking” says Chesnais. “So as a designer I had a lot of freedom. I could basically just do beautiful, crazy, unproductive pieces.” She would pile her prototypes, sometimes just mock-ups of banded metal, onto her desk. “Next to my coffee table books, next to my flowers, next to my ashtray. It became something of a decoration very naturally.”

The experience of making jewellery was a complete coup de foudre for the 20-something Chesnais. “I felt like I was speaking my mother tongue, compared to doing ready-to-wear. I felt so natural and fluent,” she says.

“When I was younger I was much more into design than fashion. I love the aspect of a beautiful object. It can be a spoon, a table, a teapot, whatever. Jewellery can have this 3D style which is amazing when it’s interacting with the body, but it can also not interact, which isn’t always the case with beautiful knitwear. If it’s not on a body, it’s kind of empty.”

Chesnais grew up near Le Mans, a small town in the orbit of the Île de France. Although Paris-obsessed as a child, she recalls fondly how even her tiny town, alongside the printer, butcher and bakery had a jewellery shop. “400 metres away from my home there was this tiny shop selling pieces of cute jewellery for children,” she recalls.“I remember very well my first ring that my mum gave to me. A tiny, tiny gold ring with a tiny strawberry in the middle.”

On the less cute end were the rings given to her by a godmother who was obsessed with antique jewellery. “I don’t want to be mean, but she used to gain weight over the years. So luckily for me the rings she bought when she was 25 didn’t fit any more, and instead of making them bigger, she used to give them to me.” Chesnais still has the pieces today.

I ask why we adorn ourselves in gold, silver, diamonds and gems. “People have been wearing jewellery forever. We have some traces from prehistoric men—a really, really long time ago,” she says. “It’s linked to religion, your place in society. It is a sign of nobility. I don’t think you can name another object that has so many inferences. It is so heavy in terms of meaning—jewellery.”

Swiftly she goes on to reference Timothée Chalamet’s look at the Oscars the day before our call. Complementing his yellow Givenchy suit, he wore stacks of Cartier jewels. “But men have been wearing jewellery forever. Back in the 17th and 18th century.”

Ultimately, however, Chesnais thinks jewellery is “emotional”. “It’s something that you give to your daughter—it’s a legacy.” Chesnais founded her brand at the age of 30, also the same year she had her first child. Her ‘Alphajewel’ line—a collaboration between Chesnais and M/M, the suitably monogrammatic Parisian design and art direction bureau—consists of 26 swirling letters that can customize pendants with the initials of loved ones. When we talk, Chesnais is wearing a chain with five such initials. Her own, her three children and her husband.

I ask the designer how her work has evolved with motherhood. “I don’t know if you are suddenly more mature,” she responds, referring to a more out-there collection of ‘Ivy’ bracelets which wrap around the hand and thumb. “I have tons of trials where the pieces were so beautiful but you cannot do anything with it. I was trying to make sure that it could be abstract and unconventional, but also comfortable. At that time I was pushing the stroller and changing diapers. I don’t want these pieces to just be for the red carpet, like a pair of 12-centimetre high heels that you wear for 15-minutes.”

Chesnais—who currently has three boutiques across Paris—is committed to building a brand that lasts, releasing “smaller collections with timeless pieces that maybe people want to wear forever.”

Her brand also runs CC SPA, a kind of tailor that allows her clients to have their jewellery restored. “A friend of mine bought a ring six years ago. And basically every two years she gets a brand new ring.”

Like the designs themselves, the collections too can be layered or stacked: “each new one responds perfectly to the first collection, which is still in store today,” she explains. Her latest collection, playfully titled ‘Iconic Blow’—revisits existing pieces, exaggerating the shapes, adding colour and stones. The pieces also have an inflated effect. “We found this technique of doing a blown shape, but totally empty, totally light—when we find new savoir-faire, I like to incorporate them into my collection.”

Chesnais’s brilliance has unsurprisingly caught the attention of other brands, and alongside her eponymous label she consults for the likes of A.P.C, Rabanne and Loro Piana. For the latter she recently launched a range of candlesticks. But the enlargement of scale doesn’t dilute her codes. “Sometimes I work on a sculpture and the sculpture scales down to become jewellery and sometimes it’s the opposite,” she says. “There’s no one process for sculpture and one for jewellery. The creative thinking is in the same box.”

Focused on the product, Chesnais doesn’t tend to think about the person who will end up wearing her jewels. “Which doesn’t mean that when I see a super chic woman or a young girl or an older woman or a boy wearing my jewellery I’m super happy and proud, but when I create the collection, I don’t personalize it—it has to be nice on the table, it has to be nice on the body,” she says.

While she is aware that putting herself forward as the face of her brand is good for business, Chesnais has a quiet presence—able to go unnoticed, even as her designs diffuse across Paris and the world. It’s her kids doing the work to identify her. “Last time we were on a train, my kids went to speak to a woman. They said ‘your necklace—it’s from my mum.’” She herself feels more uncomfortable being recognized as Charlotte Chesnais. “I’m not pretending to be famous. But I was with my boyfriend in the car at the weekend and we started to fight with another car and I realised that it was a journalist and I was hiding and I was like this is so embarrassing,” she tells me. “I was like, oh no, I cannot be this girl.”

By Kitty Grady for Semaine.
Photography by Alix Bortoli.