Chanel Layers Watches, Secret Necklaces, and a Ring at Watches and Wonders

Chanel treated timekeeping like a piece of jewelry that could move from wrist to neck to finger at Watches and Wonders Geneva, where wristwatches shared space with secret long necklaces and a secret ring. The maison’s 2026 Métiers d’Art watch collection held five creations, and its centerpiece was a chessboard Chanel called the first Haute Horlogerie chessboard in the world.

That is the real shift here: Chanel is not presenting watches only as instruments. It is treating them as wearable high jewelry, with the house’s own line that “Time is worn on the wrist, but also around the neck and even on the finger.” In practical terms, that changes how a look is built. A long pendant watch becomes the anchor, which means shorter chains, collar necklaces, and heavy stacks have to step back and let one piece carry the silhouette.

Among the named creations, Mademoiselle the Queen stood out as a 43 mm wristwatch version of Gabrielle Chanel in 18k white gold, set with diamonds and powered by a high-precision quartz movement. The lineup also included a Coco Game watch pendant necklace, a pixelated J12 Coco Game watch, and the Noeud de Diamants cuff watch. That range matters because it pushes Chanel’s watch language beyond utility and into the territory of sautoirs, cuffs, and rings, where length, texture, and balance matter as much as timing.

Chanel says the designs were imagined at the Chanel Watch Creation Studio in Paris and assembled at the Chanel Manufacture in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. The house traces its watchmaking story back to the launch of the Première in 1987, and says every timepiece imagined by the Creation Studio has come to life at that Swiss manufacture since the beginning. That Paris-to-Switzerland route is the strongest provenance story in the collection, even as the brand leans more heavily on craft and theatricality than on deep material disclosure beyond the named gold, diamonds, and quartz movement.

The broader fair program reinforced the point, with a 14-piece Coco Game capsule and new J12 sizes and movements extending the same idea across the line. Chanel’s message was plain: when a hero piece can hang, wrap, or sit on the wrist, the rest of the stack should be edited with discipline. The strongest jewelry look now is not the fullest one, but the one that knows exactly where the eye should land.