The secret of the Chanel tweed jacket

You don’t need to know much about fashion to be aware that there is no item of clothing more potent than a Chanel tweed jacket. Luxury’s clearest signifiers are usually logos, followed by accessories. A jacket is not an accessory, needless to say, and while the brand’s interlocked Cs may be present in miniature on its buttons, one needs to be up close and very personal to clock this fact.

Yet I have had people register that I am wearing Chanel tweed the second I have walked through the door into a crowded room, with them on the other side of it. And, once they have made a beeline for me, which is what people tend to do when you are wearing one of these beauties (“Is that Cha-NEL?”), they then swoon. Yes, swoon. Nothing else I have ever worn has had quite the same effect on others.

Even the plainest styles represent boldface dressing at its most chic. But at the same time there is an intimacy to a Chanel jacket. Part of this is to do with the tweed itself, as well as the detailing, both so richly rendered that together they create a topography of texture that is akin to a kind of landscape.

A look from the Chanel cruise collection, modelled in Monte Carlo, Monaco

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How apt, given that tweed originally sprang from the moors of Scotland. And that when Coco Chanel set about reinventing it in the 1920s, during a period when she would spend swathes of time at the Scottish estate of her then lover, the 2nd Duke of Westminster, she would bring sprigs of pink and purple heather to the local weavers as colour references.

Some of the most elaborate have to be seen in the flesh to be believed. Take one of the iterations at Chanel’s cruise show in Miami in November, cut out of a so-called fantasy tweed made for Chanel by the Lesage embroidery atelier. The multi-hued fabric is decorated with tiny pink bows inspired by a tapestry at Coco Chanel’s villa La Pausa on the French Riviera. The sleeves are embroidered with 23 hours’ worth of tiny flowers, sequins, glass beads and lochrose crystals. This work was done by Montex, another of the artisanal workshops bought by Chanel and now housed in Le19M, a state-of-the-art complex in Paris. The buttons are jewel formulations of the brand’s signature camellia.

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Such is the Lilliputian precision of the finishing of this jacket that it really is primarily for the wearer. Here is an article of clothing that may be performative but is also highly personal. True luxury is, among other things, about narrative: the collective narrative of the brand, and the narrative particular to a given item. This piece doesn’t only reference a tapestry, it is one: a weaving together of myriad threads of story, about which only the wearer is fully cognisant.

It might be easy to conclude that it should be hanging in a gallery. Except it shouldn’t. Because a Chanel jacket is designed, in the most precise sense of the word, to be worn. “I really care about women,” Coco Chanel once said, “and I want to dress them in suits that make them feel at ease but that still emphasise femininity.”

Coco Chanel reinvented the tweed fabric, originally reserved for country sports

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Tweed was in origin all about ease; it was a performance fabric, both moisture-resistant and durable. The men’s suiting for which it was deployed, until Chanel came along, was worn for the country sports of hunting, shooting and fishing. The French designer stayed true to those practical origins. She cut her jacket without darts, to increase suppleness. She set the sleeve high on the shoulder to optimise comfort. She insisted on lining panels that exactly mirrored the tweed panels so that they might move together without restriction. (“The inside should match the outside” was one of her mantras.) A brass chain was sewn to the inside hem so that the fall of the jacket would be just so.

However precious, recherché even, today’s finished product may be, this functionality remains. Here is the other variety of intimacy that a Chanel jacket delivers to its wearer. The detail that one feels rather than sees. It’s a second skin. The most luxurious imaginable.