Chanel’s Flagship Watch the J12 Gets Dressed in Bleu
A special colour for the 25th anniversary.
Geneva transforms into a citywide celebration of watchmaking during Watches and Wonders, and brand messaging is ubiquitous. Even so, there is one campaign that stands out from the rest: white pole banners that line the streets of the Swiss city with the messaging “It’s not black. It’s not white. It’s bleu.” Cue the campaign for the new J12 watch collection by Chanel.
Twenty-five years after the J12 revolutionized the watch industry—first in black ceramic, followed by white—Chanel has released a limited-edition line of J12 watches in a celebratory hue: bleu. The introduction of a new colour is a welcome addition to the J12 lineup, but for a fashion house known for its signature black-and-white palette, introducing a new colour is a big deal. As Arnaud Chastaingt, director of the Chanel watch creation studio, put it, “In the course of 25 years, Chanel has elevated ceramic to the level of a precious material. I dreamt of giving a colour to black, of illuminating it with blue. The final choice of this particular blue was like an epiphany—a blue that is nearly black or a black that is nearly blue.”
The smallest of the J12 Bleu models at 28mm.
The 42mm flying tourbillon J12 model.
This distinctive hue took five years of research resulting, in an intensely deep-blue matte-ceramic. A total of nine models make up the J12 Bleu collection, ranging from a petite 28-millimetre quartz-powered model to a 42-millimetre flying tourbillon—eight clad in the signature blue ceramic and one fashioned from blue sapphire crystal.
Blue sapphire crystal J12 Bleu.
The Chanel universe is epitomized by a few epochal pieces: No. 5, the lion, the 2.55 handbag, the camellia, and the J12—in black, white, and now, bleu.
