Arnaud Chastaingt. Photo: Courtesy of Chanel
Arnaud Chastaingt was appointed director of the Chanel Watchmaking Creation Studio in May 2013. Since then, the graduate of the Strate School of Design in Paris has produced the Code Coco, Monsieur, Boy·Friend, and Première watches in all of their incarnations, as well as the Mademoiselle Privé pieces honoring Chanel’s Métiers d’Art. Each year, Chastaingt creates an outrageous capsule collection that fuses modernity and femininity, such as Chanel Electro, Wanted De Chanel, and Chanel Interstellar Capsule Collection, offering the pinnacle of his vision for watchmaking and haute horlogerie. He has created five in-house calibres, including the 2016 release of the Monsieur watch’s Calibre 1. Vogue Arabia caught up with Chastaingt on the sidelines of the Dubai Watch Week.
You have spent around a decade as director of the Chanel Watchmaking Creation Studio – what has changed and what hasn’t?
I started working for Chanel in 2013. I always had a passion for the maison and it was the only brand that I was ready to leave my work for. When I was offered a job to work on the Chanel watches, it was for me impossible to decline the opportunity. In 10 years, the collection is growing year after year, and different icons were added to the celebrated J12. When I started, J12 was in the center of the collection and even today it is still in the center of my collection. So, in retrospect, a lot of things have changed since my arrival. Whether it is about giving new looks to timeless watches like J12 or Première, or proposing some transversal capsule collections like I did with Electro or Interstellar or introducing new watch signatures like Monsieur de Chanel equipped with our first in-house movement the Caliber 1, Code Coco, Boy-Friend. And last but not least the Mademoiselle Privé Haute Horlogerie collection, which is a fantastic field of creation when it’s about Mademoiselle Privé Bouton or…
