Chanel has appointed Marie-Laure Cérède as director of its jewelry creation studio, a move that brings one of the luxury jewelry world’s most experienced creative leaders to a house that has been systematically building its high jewelry credentials. Cérède, who spent more than a decade at Cartier, most recently as creative director of jewelry and watchmaking, will join Chanel in October 2026, overseeing both fine jewelry and high jewelry collections.
With Cérède’s first collections expected to arrive in 2027, the fashion house’s jewelry clients can anticipate a period of creative transition—one that will test whether Chanel’s existing jewelry identity has enough tensile strength to absorb a new creative director’s perspective without losing the specific sparkle of what made it desirable in the first place.
The appointment signals Chanel’s ambition to deepen its investment in high jewelry, a category that has become a critical battleground for luxury maisons seeking higher-margin growth beyond leather goods and ready-to-wear. Chanel’s jewelry division, led by president Frédéric Grangié, has been on an upward trajectory, with the recent relaunch of the Comet collection and the expansion of the Coco Crush line demonstrating strong retail performance. But the house has not had a dedicated creative director for jewelry since the departure of former artistic director of jewelry design in-house; Cérède’s appointment fills a leadership gap that had become conspicuous as competitors like Dior, Louis Vuitton, and Hermès accelerated their high jewelry output.
Cérède’s tenure at Cartier included the development of some of the maison’s most commercially and critically successful high jewelry collections, including the Sixième Sens and Nature Sauvage lines. Her design philosophy, rooted in a deep understanding of gemstone materiality and the structural logic of precious metal, aligns well with Chanel’s jewelry codes—the five-pointed star, the lion’s head, the camellia—which have historically been treated as symbolic motifs rather than open-ended design systems. Cérède’s mandate is to expand that vocabulary.
The move also reflects a broader talent migration within the luxury jewelry sector. As watchmaking has struggled with post-pandemic demand normalization, several senior jewelry designers have shifted from watch-and-jewelry conglomerates toward pure jewelry maisons and fashion houses investing in fine jewelry. Cérède follows a trajectory similar to that of Francesca Amfitheatrof, who moved from Tiffany & Co. to Louis Vuitton, and Nathalie Verdeille, who moved from Cartier to Tiffany.
