Chanel names Marie-Laure Cérède to lead jewelry creation studio

Chanel is placing a Cartier-trained eye at the center of its jewelry future. Marie-Laure Cérède will join the house in October as director of the jewelry creation studio, a role that puts her in charge of Chanel’s precious jewelry and high-jewelry creations and in direct reporting line to Frédéric Grangié, president of Chanel Watches and Fine Jewelry.

For readers who follow jewelry the way others follow fashion weeks, the significance is not corporate reshuffling but design direction. Cérède arrives with a résumé that spans Cartier and Harry Winston, two houses with very different but equally disciplined ideas about signature and scale. Trade reporting says she returned to Cartier in 2016 and spent nearly 10 years there as creative director of jewelry and watchmaking, experience that could sharpen Chanel’s own vocabulary toward pieces that feel immediately recognizable, but also easier to live with day to day.

That matters at 18 Place Vendôme in Paris, where Chanel concentrates its fine- and high-jewelry operations. The house says the historic site houses the Creation Studios, the High Jewelry workshop, the Patrimoine and the boutique, and that high-jewelry pieces begin as sketches in the fine jewelry creation studio before being crafted by artisans on site. In practical terms, that kind of proximity usually produces cleaner handoffs between concept, setting, and finishing, the sort of workflow that can make a necklace sit flatter at the collarbone, a bracelet stack more neatly, or a ring feel less like sculpture and more like something you can wear repeatedly.

Cérède’s appointment also lands inside a broader creative reset at Chanel, following the arrival of Matthieu Blazy as artistic director for fashion, couture and related collections in late 2024. Chanel has not disclosed precise revenue for the division, but Morgan Stanley analysts have estimated that watches and fine jewelry account for about 5 percent of the group’s turnover, nearly $1 billion in annual revenue. That scale gives the jewelry studio room to influence more than red-carpet pieces; it can shape the house’s next generation of modern classics.

The most telling shift to watch may be less about grand statements than about repetition, proportion and wearability. Cérède’s background suggests Chanel may lean harder into pieces with strong signatures that still layer well, travel well and disappear comfortably into a daily uniform, the kind of fine jewelry that reads as investment because it solves a real style problem. Cérède said she is honored to join Chanel and looks forward to writing the next chapter with the house’s teams, and the next chapter may well be measured in how elegantly Chanel turns statement into habit.