Chanel names Cartier alum Marie-Laure Cérède to lead jewelry design

Chanel has handed its jewelry creation studio to Marie-Laure Cérède, a designer whose resume runs through Cartier and Harry Winston and whose work sits close to some of modern luxury’s clearest codes. The move points to a possible reset for Chanel jewelry: less fashion-season novelty, more disciplined identity.

The house named Cérède director of the jewelry creation studio in June 2026, with an expected start in October. She will report to Frédéric Grangié, Chanel’s president of watches and fine jewelry, and oversee all precious jewelry and high jewelry creations, with teams in Paris and Geneva. That puts one designer at the center of the brand’s polished gold, gem-set and high-jewelry language.

Cérède’s Cartier years explain why the appointment landed with such force. Cartier says the Love bracelet was created in New York in 1969 by Aldo Cipullo, and Juste un Clou turned a simple nail into jewelry in the 1970s. Cérède also oversaw Clash de Cartier, a line built around studs, clous de Paris, colored stones, onyx, XL volumes and modular wearing options. For a minimalist audience, that matters because Cartier’s strongest jewelry codes are legible at a glance: sharp, recognizable, and easy to read across a wrist, hand or neckline.

Chanel has been building its own visual language in parallel. Its fine-jewelry collections are organized around House codes and symbols, and the materials list is more exacting than vague luxury jargon suggests: 18K gold, ceramic, rock crystal, cultured pearls and diamonds. Its high jewelry pieces are produced at 18 Place Vendôme in Paris, a detail that underlines how seriously the house treats the category when the design is right.

The timing also fits Chanel’s wider push. In 2024, the company opened dedicated Watches and Fine Jewellery flagship boutiques in New York and Taipei and said it would keep expanding in 2025 and beyond, including in India and Mexico, as well as more boutiques in Mainland China, Japan and Canada. That is not the behavior of a house treating jewelry as an accessory sideline.

Cérède spent 14 years at Harry Winston before becoming Cartier’s creative director of jewelry and watchmaking from 2016 until earlier this year. That mix of heritage houses and hard-edged iconography suggests Chanel wants a stronger signature, not just prettier product. If the hire works, Chanel jewelry could move closer to the kind of unmistakable, covetable code that Cartier has long owned, while giving Chanel its own more defined high-jewelry voice.