Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

An examination of the jewellery created by Coco Chanel. With the help of illustrations and documents, and based on archive research and interviews with Chanel's colleagues and other witnesses of her life and career, this book presents this facet of her career.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This latest attempt to interpret Chanel's revolutionary fashion aesthetic focuses on her jewelry designs, which often owed much to Byzantine, Renaissance, and Baroque forms. Mauries's spare essay omits much of the conjecture that plagues other books about the designer (Claude Baillen's Chanel Solitaire , LJ 1/15/75; Edmonde Charles-Roux's Chanel: Her Life, Her World , LJ 10/15/75) but offers facts and quotations that will be familiar to Chanel fans. Charming contemporary sketches and striking photographs are the core of the book. They allow readers to compare Chanel's jewelry adaptations with their historic originals and to observe how the colorful fantasy pieces decorated otherwise drab Chanel fashions. Inclusive costume history collections might wish to add this volume, but Jean Leymarie's massive Chanel ( LJ 3/1/88) is the better buy.-- Therese Duzinkiewicz Baker, Western Kentucky Univ. Libs., Bowling Green (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

"When you make imitation jewelry, you always make it bigger." So confided Chanel, the doyenne of costume baubles who brought forth the concept of designer jewelry. Sifting through past creations, she cleverly incorporated just the right touch of "Chanelisme" to call them her own. As early as 1911, awed by the unrestrained jewelry designs of the fashion illustrator and designer Paul Iribe, Chanel absorbed his talent to juxtapose combinations of stones, textures, and settings only to unveil her "variations" in the 1930s--a full 20 years later. At a time when a surrealist contemporary mode followed eighteenth-century fantasy-world ideas, Chanel found inspiration in the dreamlike, theatrical trend of fantasy imagery, especially through the art of close friends Cocteau, Dali, and Picasso, who all offered unbounded creative twists to her trinkets. However, Chanel's greatest jewelry heist was the bulky settings common to ancient Byzantine jewelry; such pieces not only echoed her stand that imitation jewelry should be "bigger" but were also regarded with personal affection by her throughout her life. From Chanel's first jewelry show, which focused on astral diamond cascades, to the Byzantine reflections, this book reveals how Chanel's jewelry took relatively excessive and indiscreet proportions with deliberately irregular settings and soldered them into a sophisticated freedom and flexibility that is the epitome of Chanel style. --Janet Lawrence