STAR QUALITY

Chanel’s dazzling new haute jewellery collection zooms in on Hollywood's golden era

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It's 1930, and the American film industry, along with the entire economy, is struggling in the reverberations of the stock market crash of 1929. Celebrated Hollywood film producer Samuel Goldwyn feels that a new mood of escapism and glamour is needed, and he calls the person he believes is the only one who can introduce chic to Hollywood: Gabrielle Chanel. He offers her one million dollars.

Cautious but curious, Chanel embarks on a trial voyage, arriving in New York in March 1931 to a media frenzy. Stars flock to greet her ('Two Queens Meet!' trumpet the papers when Greta Garbo is there to welcome her) and she sets to work, creating the clothes for three films: Palmy Days (1931), Tonight or Never (1931) and The Greeks Had a Word for Them (1932). The costumes, produced in the Chanel workshops in Paris, are shipped to Hollywood, where Goldwyn and his team are thrilled by the designs, but others find them too simple compared to the flamboyance more typical on the silver screen at the time. Chanel refuses to compromise on her designs, and the collaboration ends.